Learning Languages

[Meticulous Man]

Originally posted by The Andy-Man
the list i gave was of languages i intend to learn, ie, i want to know all

Russian shouldn't be to hard seeing as alot of the letters are quite similar to greek (trying to learn classical greek to )

I did spanish and french at school, but at the time wasn't really interested, but i do have a small basic in both, so neither should be to hard (and reading spanish isn't very hard).


Does anyone know any message boards for any of those languages then? that seems like quite a good idea.




I've been thinking abouyt that one to

thx for the help guys, and keep it coming

I suggest that you first concentrate on one of the Romance languages, preferably Spanish if you live in the US or possibly French if you live in Britain, and learn to understand and speak it very well... According to www.ethnologue.com , Spanish, for example, has 89% lexical similarity with Portuguese, 82% with Italian and 75% with French, so I'd wager that it will be a lot easier to learn the other Romance languages, if needed, after you are good at one of them.

One of the learning methods I've myself been using lately has been cutting out small pieces of paper and writing a sentence in my own language on the one side and in the language I'm trying to learn on the other. If you're learning rudimentary French, for example, you can write "the weather is beautiful" on the one side and "il fait beau" on the other, etc.

When you have a deck of around 50 such pieces of paper ready, you'll start practising the sentences by first looking at the English sentence and trying to remember what it is in French, and then turning the paper and seeing if you remembered correctly. If you did, you'll set the paper aside, and if you didn't, you'll move the paper to the bottom of the deck. After you've gone through the deck four times, the phrases should be stored in your long-term memory. I can't guarantee, though, that they will remain in your active vocabulary for a long time without repetition, but hopefully you'll at least understand them in case you encounter them later.

Once you've gotten past the most rudimentary level, read lots of books and listen a lot to radio channels in the language you're attempting to learn. When trying to learn pronounciation and spoken language, a good idea might be to tape "spontaneous" interviews (preferably of young people?) that often are included in radio and TV programs and analyze how the interviewees answer the questions posed to them, maybe even make a phonetic transcript of the interview.

And if you actually get around to conversing with native speakers in the language you've been learning, do Not advertise the fact that it isn't your native language. According to my own experience, things will start going downhill fast if you do that, though it might, of course, depend on the situation.

I don't know what level of fluency you are attempting to attain and I'm not a linguist or a cognitive psychologist so a lot of the tips above might be pure crap but at least I tried.

[MRT144]

i took chinese for a while, but i really wish i had taken spanish. its so much more practical for me

[The Andy-Man]

thx, that looks like good advice Avio,

Spanish seems the most likley one i will learn at the mo

[Drake Tungsten]

Learn Welsh.

What could be easier than learning how to pronounce Rhosllanerchrugug properly, or Machynlleth, or Cwrt Mawr!

I'd like to, but it isn't exactly easy to study Welsh here in the States and I can't really justify moving to Wales just to study a language I'll never use for anything important. Maybe if I go to grad school in England I'll find a way to learn it...

[Frankychan]

hmmmm a pretty good sight is freetranslation.com Unfortunately, they only have European languages.

I've taken French and Japanese and I find Japanese easier. True, you have to learn a whole new writing style and that's probably the biggest problem, but French has masculine and feminine characteristics for the same word! Like bonne, bel, belle. WTH?! I'm glad I'm finished with french so i never have to take it again!

[yaroslav]

Originally posted by Frankychan
... but French has masculine and feminine characteristics for the same word! Like bonne, bel, belle. WTH?!

I'm a Spanish native speaker, and I get mad with English because there is not masculine/femenine characteristics for the same word! When you speak about a 'friend', as in these sentece

"A friend of me fall in love one year ago..."

I don't know if you're speaking about a male or a female friend In French or in Spanish you know perfectly if you're speaking about a woman or a man

[The Andy-Man]

Originally posted by yaroslav


I'm a Spanish native speaker, and I get mad with English because there is not masculine/femenine characteristics for the same word! When you speak about a 'friend', as in these sentece

"A friend of me fall in love one year ago..."

I don't know if you're speaking about a male or a female friend In French or in Spanish you know perfectly if you're speaking about a woman or a man

bleh, minor quibbles

I just wanna know the lot

[yaroslav]

Originally posted by The Andy-Man



bleh, minor quibbles

I just wanna know the lot

I agree that it can be a quibble, but I was only replying Frankychan and showing him how what he consider to be a annoyance is useful for me

[raghar]

Originally posted by Frankychan
French has masculine and feminine characteristics for the same word! Like bonne, bel, belle. WTH?! I'm glad I'm finished with french so i never have to take it again!

...ty Kozy chteli

So if you think belle is difficult what "i" should be after "l"
And more, I can think of three different meanings for Kozy word.

[muxec]

About 20% of words are international (greek or latin). Solver's word "bezidejnyj" is from the same root that latin "idea".
The syntax and sentense structure is symilar to Hebrew.

The real dificylty of Russian is prefixes and suffixes. For example teh pefix "pere-" can mean "More than-" (pererabotat') "again" (peredelat'), "change again" (pereplavit') and some other meanings like perebrosit'. Also some prefixes may have meaning similar to perfect tense in english.
Example: russian verb delat is english verb "do"
peredelat = do again
zadelat = remove hole, crack etc.
razdelat = destroy, split
poddelat = falsify
pridelat = attach
udelat = defeat (slang)
sdelat = complete, finish doind
nadelat = // failed to trnslate, my dictuonary says "make ready in certain amount" but it is not exact meaning
podelat = do (with no exact benefit of doing)

If you are ready to it start learning english.

[muxec]

Traditional Hebrew (hebrew of Tahah) is very-very difficult. Even Israel-born people do not know it well. Simplified Hebrew is much easier. Word and language structures are simple enought.

[Sirotnikov]

nadelat = has negative meaning. to do something bad. to wreck something, or do something in someone's disatvantage.

"what have you done??" = chto ti nadelal?

[muxec]

I learnt English at apolyton forums. T.-Andy Man, try forums in required language.

[Myrddin]

Depends why you want to learn a language, but the best way is immersion:

Go somewhere and live the language
Forget about grammer and reading (to start with)
Spend some serious time on pronunciation at the start (to get a good accent)

The first step to learning is understanding by listening, this helps you pick up on forms that are used so when you start speaking you know what just sounds right

Most native speakers do not make any sort of grammatical sense - listeners fill in the gaps for them. So don't worry about grammer, or even case endings (slur the ends of your words and no-one will notice)

If you have a good accent, everyone will assume that you make sense when you speak; the only downside is that native speakers will speed up


All the above gratis, from learning Russian

[St Leo]

Originally posted by muxec
The real dificylty of Russian is prefixes and suffixes. For example teh pefix "pere-" can mean "More than-" (pererabotat') "again" (peredelat'), "change again" (pereplavit') and some other meanings like perebrosit'.

I count two. "Work too much" and "throw too far" are in one category and "rework and re-veld" are in the other.

If this is really problematic, think of "para-" in "paranormal" and then in "paraphrase".

nadelat = // failed to trnslate, my dictuonary says "make ready in certain amount" but it is not exact meaning

Create several instances of an item without having a specific number as a goal and with a possibility of making more to come?

If you are ready to it start learning english.

That's always good advice.