Language!

thevictor390

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It has become apparent that we need a Language thread, we have so much to discuss! I'll start by linking this awesome guide to Japanese grammar for LP that explains in English how sentence structure works, rather than trying to immerse you and hope for the best like some other language programs I've tried. It's quite a read, but moves quickly.

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

We must have a lot of languages represented amongst ourselves, and personally I find the concept a bit fascinating.
 
I'll bring this over here...


What languages do you know? Also we need a thread on this, I think. Random thoughts is getting filled up with this.

I speak, but am illiterate in Greek. And I have working knowledge in descending order of ability (reading more than speaking); Italian, Spanish, and French. I'm a native English speaker and I'm in the infancy of trying to learn German. I also can fight my way through Latin.
 
French is the only language other than English that I have any proficiency in, but I am working on Japanese and have some rudimentary knowledge.
 
French is the only language other than English that I have any proficiency in, but I am working on Japanese and have some rudimentary knowledge.

I admire anyone who can tackle those character based languages.
 

:D :cheers;

I'll bring this over here...




I speak, but am illiterate in Greek. And I have working knowledge in descending order of ability (reading more than speaking); Italian, Spanish, and French. I'm a native English speaker and I'm in the infancy of trying to learn German. I also can fight my way through Latin.

Wow, that's quite a plate of old languages you got there man :D. How do you find the similarities and differences between the languages? Do you find that knowing one helps you to easily grasp another?

If you know an effective way to do so? :p

How is it in Tamil, do the letters stand for a specific "sound" ? Because well, all European languages do afaik. At work, I've a Chinese guy now. I also talked with him and as far as I understand, it is different in Chinese. The letters stand for a complete word or meaning. If you don't know the letter/sign, you're lost.

In all indian languages, the letter = a sound. Be it a consonant or a vowel. So when you know the characters you can basically start reading. That's when vocab kicks in. So let me break it down for you using tamil

? = "ka" as in "Condition"
?? = "Ki" as in "Kidding"
?? = "Kee" as in "Key" :p

Basically the first one is a short "e" sound, and the second one is a longer "e" sound. I'll make a video of this for you if you need help.

But basically, you just take the letter for "Ka" and modify it slightly to make it say different vowels. Or you can put a dot on it, and stop the sound altogether like: ??

So essentially it's just combining consonants and vowels together to make sounds. So for just the consonant "k", here are all the different vowels you can add:
?? ? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??

Which is "k, ka, kaa, ki, kee, ku, kuu, ke, keh, kai, ko, kO, kau"

So for each one, I've put the short vowel sound first and the long vowel sound second. So when it's ku and kuu it's like the "kuu" sounds in "cooking" and "cooling"

Then you have the other consonants:

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???????????

"Ka cha ta tha pa ra ya Rra la va zha zhla nya nga NNa na ma na"

And I can't really say it in text, so the video is here: http://harishphoto.com/mobile/VID_20120509_160042.mp4
 
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If the school system here wasn't so stupid and actually taught kids languages at an early age instead of HIGH SCHOOL, I might know Spanish. But I don't. I can grasp basic things, but I've mostly forgotten it all.
 
Wow, that's quite a plate of old languages you got there man :D. How do you find the similarities and differences between the languages? Do you find that knowing one helps you to easily grasp another?

Apart from English and Greek, I learned Latin first (middle school) and it laid the basic ground work that I built a general understanding of Spanish (High school), French (because hot French foreign exchange student), and Italian (college) upon.
 
I find that knowing French helps me to understand some English words, if only because English as a language is highly bastardized and has stolen a ton of words and word roots from Latin (and directly from French, at that). I do kind of want someone to practice my French on, because I fear I'm slowly losing it all...
 
Emarline, nice attempt at Spanish.

LP, you can roll your R?s really well. :lol:

I am a Portuguese native speaker myself, can understand and somewhat speak Spanish (Brazil being one of the few countries in South America that does NOT speka Spanish has it?s caveats...) and can read Italian fairly well. I also took 2 years of Mandarim and 6 months of Polish. :D


And no, I won?t make a video/audio of me speaking Spanish because it would be too easy. :mrgreen: I rather see you Americans making fools of yourselves.
 
I speak english and hebrew and I have a little bit of a handle on French and Spanish. I also can sound out words in Arabic and Russian. I can read hebrew-scripted aramaic pretty well too which is a bit of a party trick I suppose.
 
I speak English, Urdu/Hindi, and am decent at a lesser known Pakistani language called Siraiki which is spoken in the area where my family is from. It is officially considered a dialect of Punjabi but it's one of the more distant ones. I also just got back from a year in Germany, so I am so-so with German. I feel like another semester or two would have done wonders. I can't hold an interesting conversation due mostly to my lack of vocabulary but I can get through most things in daily life with my German.

Since I live in Canada I've learned French from a pretty young age but I hate the way they teach it (at least how I was taught) and my French was never near being usable even though I had good marks in class. I've pretty much lost all of it now but being in Germany has gotten me excited about languages and I want to start learning it seriously.
 
Let's see, Dutch, French, English and German were mandatory courses at school. I also studied a few years Latin and ancient Greek (I have forgotten the most of it though).
In recent years I learned a bit of Spanish and attempted Finnish (because I spend a semester there, ... I failed miserably at learning this near-impossible language).
At the moment I'm taking evening classes in Japanese (currently in my 2nd year). For some reason, I find Japanese actually quite easy to learn.

Everytime I travel somewhere, I try to learn some of the local language up front. This shows both interest and respect for the local culture, and it has proven to open doors that otherwise remain closed.
 
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I only speak 2 languages so far, English and arabic, but im planning to branch out to either spanish or german during my during my summer vacation.
 
I only know English. I failed Spanish in high school.
 
I speak:

Malayalam (Mother tongue)
Hindi
English
German

I understand and can communicate in Tamil, but can't read it. Basically once you know a couple of major regional languages in India, you can figure out most others (you can understand, but can't read as most indian languages have their own script)
 
I speak danish (duh!) and have a basic understanding of swedish and norwegian as they are close, learned english in the 6th grade and german in the 7th grade, but I struggle to remember any german though as I haven't used in years.
 
English and German. I learned French in school, but have forgotten everything apart from "bonjour", "merci", and "voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir" (which I sadly have to confess, I only remember from a song).
 
@LP: Thanks for your explanation. I'll have to watch the video this evening because I'm currently at work and can't do it here. I'll get back to you later then.
 
I know English, French (forgotten a lot of it due to not reading, writing or speaking it for a while) I have picked up some Japanese and would like to learn it properly.
 
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