Languages

[Fierce_LiNk]

2 minutes ago, bob said:

Well I'm in Hungary right now!

I found learning various verbs and tenses a bit pointless, so i just focused on a few phrases to get me through, which seems to be working. A woman this morning seemed genuinely surprised when i greeted her in Hungarian.

Enjoy!  

I think any locals in any country will always be pleased when visitors attempt to speak the language, even if it is only through a few words or phrases. It shows that you're trying to respect the language/culture, which is nice. 

[bob]

Enjoy!  
I think any locals in any country will always be pleased when visitors attempt to speak the language, even if it is only through a few words or phrases. It shows that you're trying to respect the language/culture, which is nice. 

Köszönöm, Gomba! Viszlát!

[bob]

So after returning from Budapest, i decided to switch to learning Polish, since i am supposed to be going there over Easter (looking less and less likely now, but that's a story for the coronavirus thread).

 

Polish language pros:

 

1) They don't use 'a' or 'the', so despite have three gender, you don't have to remember which version of 'a' or 'the' to use each time

 

2) The Duolingo course is back to normal after the clusterfuck of the Hungarian one - back to learning about boys having dogs, men eating bread, and ducks being large.

 

Polish language cons:

 

1) You know how in English we say 'he', 'his ' or 'him' depending on context? Apparently in Polish they change every fucking noun like this! So you change the word for dog depending on if you are talking about the dog directly, or if the dog has ownership of something etc...

 

2) Pronunciation - so many z's!

 

 

 

Also, i hit my 365 day learning streak, which is nice.

[Pestneb]

With Polish cases it may help to realise English also has a possesive case.

Dad's car

Dad's is the possessive form of Dad. the 's replaces the idea of "belonging to" ie "the car that belongs to dad" With most cases you can think of the endings (If I recall correctly it is the endings that end in Polish right?) as being words that are tagged on the end. I can't remember the case endings off the top of my head (realised to my annoyance that I have forgotten mostof my Polish!!) but for example, one case is the locative. so there is a ending meaning "located in/at/by etc" so instead of saying "the car is in the garage" I thought of Polish as saying "CarIn garage" Of course it is a lot more complicated than that, but it helped me initially. It is a pain having to remember the endings for all the cases and all the genders, to be honest I'd have preferred they kept articles than having cases!!!

Samochod and Samolot are two words I remember... I think that's car and plane. useful I know. Oh Pomocy is help I think, though not on it's own.

Anyway, iirc English already has the nominative and possessive, which I gather is similar to Polish genitive.

 

Oh, dog is "pies". I might try to pick Polish back up at some point

[Ashley]

Dupa means butt in Polish. Useful to know.

[Ike]

If anyone is after some cheap Japanese games, Ni No Kuni, Layton's Mystery Journey, Snack World and Yokai Watch 1 are all 1000yen (£7.54~) on the Japanese eShop. They all support Furigana as well.

No English support. 

[Ashley]

I was going to try and learn some Spanish while in Spanish-speaking countries (granted, all with different pronunciations to make it complicated) but while I'm trapped indoors in an English-speaking country I thought I'd at least try.

Was looking at the numbers and they're pretty similar to the Italian but wanted to check the pronunciation which led me to this wild video:

 

[Happenstance]

I’m gonna try and make a positive out of being stuck at home for a while now and get back to learning Japanese. Hopefully all of this will force me to stick with it.

[Ike]

2 hours ago, Happenstance said:

I’m gonna try and make a positive out of being stuck at home for a while now and get back to learning Japanese. Hopefully all of this will force me to stick with it.

I've noticed I'm not a tried now working from home, so I might pick it up as well if you want a study buddy for double motivation.

[Happenstance]

9 hours ago, Ike said:

I've noticed I'm not a tried now working from home, so I might pick it up as well if you want a study buddy for double motivation.

Give me a chance to go through the basics again then I might just take you up on that.

[Ashley]

Out of interest, how do people approach learning a language.  I'm trying to learn the Spanish grammar before the vocab as I found with Italian I got through vocabulary relatively easily, but I still struggle with some grammar points so I thought I'd flip it. I know when I start learning the vocab more its going to be a mixed blessing as some words will be the same as Italian (easy!), others will be similar but slightly different (pay attention!) and others will just be completely different.

[Pestneb]

I haven't really been able to focus on languages so much recently, but I've always found the most effective method was finding real life sources. I find reading really easy, so I would tend to choose random articles on wikipedia or google news in the target language and read those. As I find words I don't understand I put them into my vocab flash card bank, and I'd work pretty hard on those words. It worked well for me, as I'd be learning adult words. Learning words like "scarecrow" for example are quite obscure in day to day chat even amongst adults, whereas a word like obfuscate while naturally not of everyday use is slightly more useful!

I would use words in my word bank, for example using the verbs to practice conjugation etc (I would use google translate to find the meaning of words so could pick out the verbs easily)

the trickiest for me is actually getting listening practice in, with French/Spanish that's fairly straight forward, I'd buy a dvd and then get subtitles on and get going, but my problem has always been slang, and now I'm a bit more proficient in French I can affirm that the english dialogue/translation don't always match up fantastically, sometimes a translation is only approximately correct. For example, a double entendre regularly loses one of its two meanings, or a pun between two separate lines/scenes is lost. So really I try to find native source material, but I struggle to find good films/programs that engage my interest enough.

Generally I understand Spanish through my French, it's fairly straight forward, but the grammar is a mystery - I haven't read anything near enough Spanish.

 

Incidentally, does anyone here have any suggestions for Spanish language literature? Last books I read (way too long ago) were Marcel Pagnols, manon des sources etc. Though obviously in French. Mainly I liked his use of language, never read a translation, nor would I want to.... but any "good" (I know that's very subjective) authors people could suggest for Spanish? I'm probably more interested in Latin American as a preference, but any Spanish language author would be interesting

 

[Jonnas]

3 hours ago, Ashley said:

Out of interest, how do people approach learning a language.  I'm trying to learn the Spanish grammar before the vocab as I found with Italian I got through vocabulary relatively easily, but I still struggle with some grammar points so I thought I'd flip it. I know when I start learning the vocab more its going to be a mixed blessing as some words will be the same as Italian (easy!), others will be similar but slightly different (pay attention!) and others will just be completely different.

Generally, the order I go through is something like:

1. Learn some basic vocabulary for a start (I'm likely to know some famous words from a certain language, anyway);
2. Learn grammar, using whatever basic vocabulary I have as a crutch;
3. The rest of the vocabulary comes naturally with my increased contact with the language.

When the language is similar to something I already know, it can be both a blessing and a curse (hello, false friends!), but it generally means my starting vocabulary is larger than normal. For example, Italian is similar to Spanish and Portuguese, like you say, but I still need to learn/examine the grammar from scratch just in case there's something different. With vocabulary, you just either know it or you don't, and any mistake or knowledge gap can be filled fairly easily.

1 hour ago, Pestneb said:

whereas a word like obfuscate while naturally not of everyday use is slightly more useful!

 

Words like "obfuscate" are super useful, because you're likely to come across a situation where you want to say "lie", "misdirect" or "trick", but you can't quite remember the correct word. So you use the one synonym you do remember, even if it's otherwise uncommon.

I remember hearing the story of an English immigrant in Brazil who had trouble remembering specific nouns or adjectives in Portuguese, but he definitely remembered the adverbs (they're easier to remember in general). For example, he had trouble saying "He has confidence", but he could easily say "He acts confidently", which is an uncommon way to phrase it, but it works.

1 hour ago, Pestneb said:

Incidentally, does anyone here have any suggestions for Spanish language literature? Last books I read (way too long ago) were Marcel Pagnols, manon des sources etc. Though obviously in French. Mainly I liked his use of language, never read a translation, nor would I want to.... but any "good" (I know that's very subjective) authors people could suggest for Spanish? I'm probably more interested in Latin American as a preference, but any Spanish language author would be interesting

 

Not sure if they're easy to read, but for Latin American literature, the first authors that pop into my head are Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Marquez. For a specific book, I think 100 Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad) is well known in the English-speaking world, so you might have an easier time finding a Spanish version.

Edited March 25, 2020 by Jonnas

[Will]

6 hours ago, Ashley said:

Out of interest, how do people approach learning a language.  I'm trying to learn the Spanish grammar before the vocab as I found with Italian I got through vocabulary relatively easily, but I still struggle with some grammar points so I thought I'd flip it. I know when I start learning the vocab more its going to be a mixed blessing as some words will be the same as Italian (easy!), others will be similar but slightly different (pay attention!) and others will just be completely different.

With Japanese I found doing a little bit of everything was most productive. The school I went to would teach us a sentence structure, then we'd learn all sorts of vocabulary that could go inside the framework and at the same time practice the kanji to write them in complete sentences. That was all propped up by A TON of speaking to each other using the structures we'd learnt. As an example we'd learn something like:

[verb1た] ばかりなので、[sentence]。
Because I just did [verb1], [sentence].

The red parts are the set structures and then we'd fill in the square brackets with stuff that made sense. They'd then give us a ton of examples where we'd learn the kanji and have these as set phrases we could us in a lot of situations. 

Looking through my notes I think I've forgotten more than 50% of the Japanese I learnt, really need to get back on it. Without a doubt I think the number one thing you can do is just speak as much and as often as you can.

[Fierce_LiNk]

I had a dream last night that was almost entirely in Dutch. I guess that's a good sign!

Up to 105 day streak on Duolingo, so I'm still putting the hours in. Alternating between Dutch and Italian with a little bit of extra Spanish thrown in. 

[Fierce_LiNk]

Just throwing this out there: French makes no sense.

I jokingly started doing some on Duolingo because @Eenuh is doing the French course. I was taking the piss with my awful French accent. I started doing some of the French course and mocking it, just to muck around. But I've stuck with it for a few days, so I'm accidently re-learning French now. Writing it/typing it isn't too terrible, but speaking it?! Fucking hell. So many silent letters. There could be a word 14 letters long but you only pronounce 6 of them. The fuck? I remember why I didn't get on with it at school. Only enjoyed it because I fancied the French teacher. 

[Goafer]

For anyone wanting to learn British Sign Language, they're doing a "Pay what you can" offer at the moment. It's normally £25, so not exactly expensive to begin with, but might be of use to some.

https://www.british-sign.co.uk/shop/product/introducing-british-sign-language-enrolment-2020/

[Ashley]

1 hour ago, Fierce_LiNk said:

Just throwing this out there: French makes no sense.

I jokingly started doing some on Duolingo because @Eenuh is doing the French course. I was taking the piss with my awful French accent. I started doing some of the French course and mocking it, just to muck around. But I've stuck with it for a few days, so I'm accidently re-learning French now. Writing it/typing it isn't too terrible, but speaking it?! Fucking hell. So many silent letters. There could be a word 14 letters long but you only pronounce 6 of them. The fuck? I remember why I didn't get on with it at school. Only enjoyed it because I fancied the French teacher. 

That was my problem when trying to learn European Portuguese. They basically give up midway through a word 😋

It is nice to listen to though. 

[Jonnas]

34 minutes ago, Ashley said:

That was my problem when trying to learn European Portuguese. They basically give up midway through a word 😋

Hey, we only give up at the last syllable... So I guess you're right when it comes to all of our two-syllable words ;p

[Fierce_LiNk]

On 30/04/2020 at 11:54 PM, Ashley said:

That was my problem when trying to learn European Portuguese. They basically give up midway through a word 😋

Sounds like me in real life, tbh.

[Pestneb]

On 4/30/2020 at 11:54 PM, Ashley said:

That was my problem when trying to learn European Portuguese. They basically give up midway through a word 😋

It is nice to listen to though. 

haha, I worked with a few portugese in France.... this makes me understand why they pronounced "voiture" how they did!!!

[Fierce_LiNk]

I used to use Duolingo a lot when I started out learning Dutch before also incorporating Memrise. Originally, I got to the end of the Dutch and Spanish skill trees, but then they updated everything on Duolingo by adding the whole multiple levels thing, which completely restructured the Dutch course. It meant that I was pretty much starting over, so I left it and just exclusively used Memrise.

Over the last half a year, I've started Duolingo up again and have today just managed to get to the end of the Dutch skill tree, with level 5 on some of the earlier content and level 1s and 2s on everything else. Along the way, I've been using it for Spanish, Italian and recently French. The plan now is to try to get to the end of each of these trees and in the long-term aim to level up all of them. I'm finding French makes a lot more sense now after doing Spanish and Italian than it ever did in school. 

[Fierce_LiNk]

I've heard of people doing the "flipside" when learning languages on Duolingo. E.g. after learning Dutch into English, they've done the English into Dutch course, which is interesting. I've started that. I've also started the Italian into Spanish course which is...actual mindfuckery. My head hurts! There's a definite lag where my brain has to do lots of translating and processing, even for the basic sentences. Very challenging. 

[Fierce_LiNk]

Anyone ever used Rosetta Stone before? There's a deal going around at the moment where you get lifetime access to all 24 languages for something like £199.

I had a 3 day trial for this and used it for Dutch. It's hard to judge what I thought because the Dutch activities I had access to were very early on, so it was information that I already knew. It did feel repetitive, but you'd expect that with most learning tools, I think. One plus side is that I did feel that there was a lot of speaking into the microphone for pronunciation, which is a good thing. If I wasn't already using Duolingo and Memrise, I would 100% go for it, but just curious at the long term value of it and how much depth it goes into. The end-point, I guess. Anyone have any experience with it?

[Will]

I tried it many years ago when I first attempted to learn Japanese. My experience was pretty negative, and the study style didn’t gel with me at all. I could barely understand what it wanted me to do, and certainly didn’t learn a thing of the language from it. This was a LONG time ago (I bought it on a disc!), so it may well be different now, but I was not impressed at all.