erronousRogue

I never really needed anything besides a few online courses, and a healthy dose of Google Translate. Paying for dictionary or translation software is pretty pointless, but something like an app for flashcards or more "advanced" language learning techniques could come in handy. There are a lot of them if you have an iPhone or an Android device.

My teacher made us do it all the time, but I never really saw the point back. Even back then, it seemed so mundane and useless. Trying to READ conversations written by other people, on the other hand..

All the time. These days I mostly speak English, so if someone tries to have a conversation with my in my native language, I often find myself trying to translate sentences back from English. It gets pretty annoying sometimes.

Luckily I've memorized the position of every single option in my phone, and most of them have little pictograms accompanying them. I've had that problem once when I had to use Google Translate because I accidentally set everything to Russian. Spending two hours trying to decipher Cyrillic wasn't the most fun thing in my life, let's just say.

Maybe with slower/more poetic songs it could work, but I've found that music and "media" in general, be it TV shows or radio talkshows are a horrible idea if you're just starting out. There's way too much "advanced" slang and accented speech, which makes it all sound like gibberish, sometimes even to native speakers of the language. Heck, there are some English songs which I still don't know the lyrics of, because the singing is just too fast to comprehend unless you look it up.

A good way to figure out which one to use instead of relying on letters, is to simply memorize the pronunciation of the word, and write down the word like so (for instance, "a younicorn", or "an aour"). I don't get it why so many people have trouble understanding basic concepts like a/an or plural forms. It's honestly all pretty simple.

Cultural diversity/history/not really having a word for that thing. One perfect example I can come up with is the word we use for "paper containing a brief history of your employment and skills", either Curriculum Vitae or résumé, borrowed from Latin and French respectively (and neither of which are ever pronounced correctly). It's strange since the names of most "modern" inventions typically end up being borrowed letter for letter in other languages, FROM English, and not the other way. Even if it's a foreign invention with a name from another language, we end up making it "more English", which then becomes the standard.

I'm guilty of doing this every once in a while myself. If I'm perfectly honest, it's one of those words that should just be the same form since the pronunciation is identical. Unlike "read", being pronounced as "red" in the past tense. Some standards are just plain confusing.

I have Swype on my phone, so using absurd abbreviations and random numbers in my texts wouldn't really make sense in terms of usefulness. Not that I'd be otherwise inclined to say "lol partay @ my house 2nite" either.

There's a Twitter account, check the other sticky. It's over at https://twitter.com/linguaholic1, although there's not much on it thus far.

I... ugh. Given that a "word of the year" award doesn't mean a thing, but still. Come on people. It's not even the most popular "Facebook slang", especially in 2013.

Some of the especially obnoxious ones (cutesy words that are used in a short form for no reason) really annoy me. Although it's fine if a long technical term is shortened to save time and improve legibility in everyday conversations (e.g., "Last day I synchronised my cellular phone with the online service" sounds a bit more meaty than "synced my phone to the cloud", even if the latter is more annoying.)

Just tried it, it isn't exactly the hardest quiz ever. Some of the answers are a bit weird though. For example, the phrase "_______ that the American Indian crossed a land bridge into North America from what is now Russia." It can be correctly completed with both past and present terms. The quiz says the correct answer is "It is thought", but the option "It was thought" is just as correct. The only thing that changes is the meaning of the sentence itself, and both are in fact grammatically correct. "it is thought" would imply that people still believe in the assumption and nothing has proven it wrong, whereas "it was thought" would mean that the theory is incorrect, as something has proven it otherwise since then.

Scandinavian languages are similar in their vocabulary and grammar, but they're not exactly the same. You'd be able to comprehend certain words the same way you understand German from knowing English (lampen, apfel, zucker, etc.), but you wouldn't be able to flawlessly speak the language itself, especially if you start with Swedish. The languages are a bit more closely related than English/German though, and you would be able to understand around 80-90% of Swedish vocabulary and written language by speaking Norwegian. If you want to understand Danish or Swedish as well in addition to your new language, your best bet is probably to start learning Norwegian (Bokmål), as it shares the most in common with the other languages. And Finnish is just completely different.

Using it as a personal attack (i.e "You made grammatical mistakes therefor you must be stupid and your opinion ranks lower than mine") is just a sign of incompetence, and having nothing to say yourself. People who point out grammatical errors in a sentence are typically doing so to stall time, or to make themselves appear more "refined" than the person they're trying to argue with, simply because they assume their language skills are better.