The Wonderland Board

I have that in the signature. Try to guess what I'm learning!

Turkish, German, Esperanto, Swedish

Is it German? Or Dutch (If Dutch is even a language)?

I am learning Italian!
But I really don't do it anymore.

I'm learning Mandarin Chinese and plan to start learning Danish/Norwegian. I learned Spanish a few years back but didn't really like it.
I'm kind of learning Japanese; I know the syllabaries and some basic vocab in them, and from learning Chinese I can understand some Kanji too. I can't speak any Japanese, though, and that's a whole other thing anyways.

Currently learning Hebrew, started slowly learning Japanese, and I might learn German eventually too.

There's actually an app called Duolinguo that helps you learn languages.

loofisawesome wrote:There's actually an app called Duolinguo that helps you learn languages.

It's all about motivation, no program will make you learn languages so easily. I'll still check this though, eventually.

EDIT: I've tried learning a bit of german on there, seems like it's a very proper way to learn. Sad though that there aren't other non-latin languages like Japanese.

Ich kann auch ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen. Ich war in mein Deutschklasse nur ein Jahr, aber ich glaube, ich bin nicht zu schlecht.

garirry wrote:

loofisawesome wrote:There's actually an app called Duolinguo that helps you learn languages.

It's all about motivation, no program will make you learn languages so easily. I'll still check this though, eventually.

EDIT: I've tried learning a bit of german on there, seems like it's a very proper way to learn. Sad though that there aren't other non-latin languages like Japanese.

That's kind of how learning works though. You still have to put in effort if you use programs or not. Also, Memrise has Japanese courses.

Ich spreche fast kein Deutsch.

Jeg forstår lite Norsk,
but very little and I'm still learning that alone after a year.

Für vier Jahre habe ich Deutsch gelernt, aber nicht mehr. Deshalb habe ich viel vergessen. Wenn ich die Deutschen hören, kann ich nicht immer sie verstehen, weil sie zu schnell sprechen! A few of them speak in thick accents which makes it really difficult to understand them when they speak fast!

German is an easy language to pick up, especially for English speakers, but a hard one to master. One of the reasons why I chose not to continue was due to the need to write argumentative essays in German for A-Levels *shudders*

我从小就开始学华文了。I am much more familiar with Chinese than German (it takes me less time to verbalise a coherent sentence), but I hate sitting for Chinese exams because I don't do that well, and it doesn't help that the papers are relatively difficult! Thank God I'm free from Chinese now as well!

Good luck to those learning Chinese here! You'll need it. Also, Japanese may at first glance seem like Chinese, but then you realise that they are completely different! There's hiragana, for one, and also, many kanji don't share the same meaning as their Chinese counterparts. For example, 大丈夫 in Japanese means "All right", i.e. 大丈夫? means Are you okay?, but in Chinese, it means "Real Man", or literally, "big husband"!

garirry wrote:

loofisawesome wrote:There's actually an app called Duolinguo that helps you learn languages.

It's all about motivation, no program will make you learn languages so easily. I'll still check this though, eventually.

EDIT: I've tried learning a bit of german on there, seems like it's a very proper way to learn. Sad though that there aren't other non-latin languages like Japanese.

There are some Cyrillic languages, and they are working on Yiddish, Hebrew and Hindi.

My native tongues are English and Hebrew. I've studied French, Persian, Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese, and have recently started Finnish and Hungarian.

I also learned some Malay and Zulu in the past, but unfortunately I forgot everything.

Just wondering since we're already on the topic of languages – is anyone here interested in language construction?

Oh, I am!

I created a language when I was 11...
kind of stopped on it, then picked up again when I was...

14 maybe?

I was sure I'd be fine with 36 letters,
but even up until last week I made the count 75.

There are also, like, 2k words in it, so...

I could actually type it out fluently, if I were able to use its alphabet.

Unfortunately, since that's not really possible, I have to make ELE(English-Latin Entogan) and SLE (Singular-Latin Entogan) forms.

Deeman's also pretty into language construction;
they've made a couple of them from what I could tell.

And, I must say, it's a lot easier for me to make a language than learn another one...

May seem like more work, but at least I get to know what I'm doing,
plus my interest in it doesn't plummit.

I know a fair amount of Latin, although I've finished the Latin courses my school offers, so I'm not really *learning* any languages at the moment.

samuelthx wrote:Also, Japanese may at first glance seem like Chinese, but then you realise that they are completely different! There's hiragana, for one, and also, many kanji don't share the same meaning as their Chinese counterparts. For example, 大丈夫 in Japanese means "All right", i.e. 大丈夫? means Are you okay?, but in Chinese, it means "Real Man", or literally, "big husband"!

Japanese is completely different language-base. There isn't a single similarity. Japan, however, imported the writing system from China, which eventually evolved into Hiragana and Katakana, and it has many chinese characters which were re-used in Japanese, although the pronunciation is completely different, and the meaning is sometimes different as well.

Oh, and, thanks SS01 for the link.

Jutomi wrote:Deeman's also pretty into language construction;
they've made a couple of them from what I could tell.

Yeah, I have. I think something like four now, at varying levels of "completeness".
Also, I've been learning French for a few years now.

samuelthx wrote:Good luck to those learning Chinese here! You'll need it. :lol: Also, Japanese may at first glance seem like Chinese, but then you realise that they are completely different! There's hiragana, for one, and also, many kanji don't share the same meaning as their Chinese counterparts. For example, 大丈夫 in Japanese means "All right", i.e. 大丈夫? means Are you okay?, but in Chinese, it means "Real Man", or literally, "big husband"! :lol: :lol: :lol:

That is true, and for many words in Japanese it's the same thing, but there's a staggering number of similarities, and knowing the structure of Japanese makes it quite a lot easier to see from context whether or not it's similar to the Chinese word. For example, 原子力所 means "nuclear power plant" (lit. "place of origin of atom power") in both Japanese and Chinese; although it looks weird to write it as such in Chinese (meaning something closer to "the atom force location"), it's perfectly understandable in both languages. And plus, to know just 力 (power/force) and 所 ("the place" kind of) can help you understand it at a basic level.

Completely unrelated to that, I can't get most online/DIY language courses to work for me.
Duolingo was okay I guess, but it starts off by teaching you vocab immediately, not even stopping to teach you any differences in grammar, pronunciation, or pretty much any nuances of the language you're learning; it expects you to either already know all of that or just pick it up intuitively, neither of which I did, even after completing two levels of German. Not to mention that it needlessly gamifies everything; there was some sort of life system and leaderboards and I really didn't need that to learn a language.
Same with Rosetta Stone; for the Japanese course it does, it assumes you already know about its two syllabaries and what Kanji is and how to speak all of those correctly. The very first sentence it tried to teach me was "The boy drinks orange juice," in a combination of Hiragana and Kanji. I gave up very quickly, because at that time I didn't even know basic things such as the fact Japanese is SOV, so there was no way I'd be able to identify the verb in a sentence.
The only language course that really worked for me was Lingualift. I took the Japanese course for their 14-day free trial, and it started off correctly; it began by talking about how Japanese works and sounds and even a bit about Japanese culture. It let me move at my own pace and had countless resources I could use to learn with (an e-textbook, printout practice sheets, several different online practice modes, and a whole lot more). The way it teaches Hiragana and Katakana is that it will give you a new character to learn, you'll write it a few times on a sheet of paper to get the hang of it, and it'll ask you to pronounce, identify, or spell a few different words incorporating all the characters you know up to that point, and it really worked. Sadly, I never ended up paying for it, even though it was really cheap, and you could learn several different languages through them. And for the record, no, they didn't pay me to say that; I just really liked them.

samuelthx wrote:Für vier Jahre habe ich Deutsch gelernt, aber nicht mehr. Deshalb habe ich viel vergessen. Wenn ich die Deutschen hören, kann ich nicht immer sie verstehen, weil sie zu schnell sprechen! A few of them speak in thick accents which makes it really difficult to understand them when they speak fast!

German is an easy language to pick up, especially for English speakers, but a hard one to master. One of the reasons why I chose not to continue was due to the need to write argumentative essays in German for A-Levels *shudders*

Yeah, German was pretty easy to learn, I was able to understand the general idea of what you just said. I'm not looking forward to writing papers in it though... I had to do that for a placement exam for a special high school I'm going to and it felt really awkward and forced.

~xpr'd~ wrote:

samuelthx wrote:Good luck to those learning Chinese here! You'll need it. Also, Japanese may at first glance seem like Chinese, but then you realise that they are completely different! There's hiragana, for one, and also, many kanji don't share the same meaning as their Chinese counterparts. For example, 大丈夫 in Japanese means "All right", i.e. 大丈夫? means Are you okay?, but in Chinese, it means "Real Man", or literally, "big husband"!

That is true, and for many words in Japanese it's the same thing, but there's a staggering number of similarities, and knowing the structure of Japanese makes it quite a lot easier to see from context whether or not it's similar to the Chinese word. For example, 原子力所 means "nuclear power plant" (lit. "place of origin of atom power") in both Japanese and Chinese; although it looks weird to write it as such in Chinese (meaning something closer to "the atom force location"), it's perfectly understandable in both languages. And plus, to know just 力 (power/force) and 所 ("the place" kind of) can help you understand it at a basic level

Yep, I agree. I would have been quite lost in Japan if not for my Chinese knowledge. I was thinking of 出口, which means exit in both languages.

I have never taken an online course on learning a foreign language. I think going to a class with a teacher would be far more effective. That said, online courses are useful for languages like German, which bears great similarity to English, IMO.

For German, I've only ever written letters and picture compositions. I can't imagine writing a full-blown argumentative essay. Good luck!

That reminds me, I'm also learning English.

Yes, it's the one I was raised with,
but English is such an expansive language.