linguaholic

Thank you FlagOnce!

Interesting question Anna. Let me give you my opinion on this. Let's take Chinese as an example: Pronunciation: I would definitely go for Native Speakers. Grammar: I would prefer someone sharing the same mother tongue as me teaching me Chinese Grammar. Why? Simply because native speakers of my language (German) who mastered Chinese (Grammar), they stumbled upon the same problems that I will have to deal with, because people sharing the same 'language background' often have similar problems when it comes to studying foreign languages (especially foreign grammar). Writing: Both native speakers and foreigners are acceptable Reading: Is close to pronunciation, therefore I would rather go with a native speaker. I showed everyone my preferences when it comes to studying Chinese. When studying other languages, other 'rules' would apply, though. For instance, when studying a language that is close to German, I would most probably not have a lot of problems with the pronunciation of words/syllables/etc, so a non-native speaker would be totally OK as well.

I guess ASL is not universal for the same reason spoken languages are not universal. Even in Switzerland ( a very small country) we have dozens of different sign languages. I guess the reasons are really the same as for spoken languages: People want their own identity and they have different cultural backgrounds, etc.

yeaaaa Miya is back. That's great news!

Same for me Wanda. Unilang seems to be an interesting place but it is just Chaos there. And the layout/design is not very modern/attractive to say the least.

I like number 5. Scrabble is a fantastic game for language learning.

J'adore faire du shopping avec mes amies car je m'amuse bien avec elles.

Etymology is definitely very valuable. For instance, it helped me a lot with my Chinese Studies.

Dear Multilingo I am going to make some corrections to your paragraph later on today. And I am also going to make some comments about your first statement. I am moving to another city this weekend, so I have lots of things to do today, so please excuse my late answer.

Interesting question. I had this problem sometimes when I had to translate Ancient Chinese texts into German. In ancient China, they had some very special units that actually make no sense for people from other countries/cultures. But still. I would probably keep the unit in my German text and explain the unit in a footnote, rather than just converting the unit to some well-known unit (if possible. There might be units for things in China that you can't even convert in something else because maybe we don't even have a unit to measure unit X. )

You are welcome lozpayne

Yea, I was thinking about IPA as well. Maybe one day I'm going to open a section just for IPA here on linguaholic.com :=) Also a section for ASL would be interesting. However, my experience in running forums tells me that is NOT a good idea to make too many subforums.

It's a good question. Anyway there can always be some exceptions in this kind of thing. However, in general it goes like this: Verbs like: manger, dire, danser, parler, boire, manger Their form in third person plural is - ils disent- ils dansent- ils parlent- ils boivent Here you never pronounce the 'ent' ending. So in general, in third person plural you do not pronounce the 'ent'. But I still don`t understand why is there a difference in pronunciation of -ent in different verbs. To be more specific, veulent and peuvent are pronounced different compared to devient, even though the termination is the same. So, is because there are different persons (il/ils), different verbs? --->well yes. Because devient is third person singular and peuvent and veulent is third person plural. Moreover, devenir is a verb of the third group of French verbs. And other verbs from this group they can have the same form. So the verb devenir is like the verb tenir. Present je deviens tu deviens il devient nous devenons vous devenez ils deviennent Simple Past je devins tu devins il devint nous devînmes vous devîntes ils devinrent Present je tiens tu tiens il tient nous tenons vous tenez ils tiennent Simple Past je tins tu tins il tint nous tînmes vous tîntes ils tinrent Have a look at the verb conjugation in third person singular. For 'devenir' you had il devient and for tenir you have il tient. And the pronunciation of the verb suffix (ending) is the same for those two verbs. Hope that helps. regards Lingua

Hi Lozpayne It does make sense. The sentence is correct like this. You might want to add a 'bientôt' bevor avoir to make this sound a little bit nicer. It is not mandatory though. Another possibility would be to say: pour mon frère qui va fêter ses 5 ans. Hope that helps. regards Lingua

My answer to this question is pretty simple: Studying languages has always been a part of my career. I studied Translation at the university, so of course almost all my studies had something to do with languages. After that, I started studying Chinese, so then again, my motivation was very high from the beginning because I just had to study that language almost every day in order to pass my exams and homework, etc. And then...my other major at university is computational linguistics, so there again I need to study a lot about grammar, syntax, sentence structures, machine-based algorithms and so on. Languages all the way for me

oh I got this wrong then. I thought he would refer to something like all the different syllables in Chinese or just the different sounds of all the letters from A to Z.

I have an amazing Polyglot friend and he would probably say Russian is the hardest out of those three. He speaks about 10 languages (German, French, English, Chinese, Cantonese, Russian, Spanish and some others) and he always told me that Russian was actually the hardest language for him to learn. We both studied Chinese and he was always like: Chinese is ok but Russian is really hard. However, I have to admit that I have not studied either of those 3 languages (yet).

I feel that way as well. I still like Chinese, though :=)

Hi there and welcome to linguaholic.com! I guess you mean ils veulent ? Because there is no such thing as il veulent. Best wishes L

Good Morning I am a bit in a hurry right now. I will have a look at the question this afternoon and get back to you as soon as possible. regards Lingua

Welcome onboard Cave Bear. Your introduction is very interesting, indeed. I am surprised to hear that Korean is that difficult. The Hangeul alphabet is pretty easy to learn, though. Is that correct?

In my opinion, it depends on what language you are actually learning. When I was learning Chinese, it was very important for me to learn it, because it was all new for me. So we did learn this in class and many Chinese textbooks contain exercises and lists about this subject. However, when I was studying French for instance, I also had to learn the basics about the phonetic alphabet, but it was definitely not a very important element in my 'french learning journey'.

Dear All Idioms are hard to translate. That's why I would like ALL of you to participate in this little task/game. I created a new Google Documents List and listed some of the most popular English idioms/sayings. Please help to translate them into your language. I already added some languages. Feel free to add your language if not yet on the list and provide the translation. Only translate the idiom if there is actually an idiomatic/metaphorical equivalent in your language. Feel free to add new English idioms as well. The English idioms are in alphabetical order, so when adding new idioms, make sure you add them at the right place. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hSeZC1VuczQsbxgWnomagUcfGqETh07BHDqRRvp9QfE/edit?usp=sharing Happy contributing! Thanks for your support

Hi -su- If you have any questions or informatinon to share about Latin, please post it here: http://linguaholic.com/forum/66-study-latin So in fact, we do have a Latin section. :=) regards Lingua

I was wondering if any of you ever came across something like a online dictionary for idioms / metaphors? Of course it is possible to find some idioms / metaphors in regular dictionaries but they usually provide just some easy ones and especially only short ones. But what about whole phrases? The only online dictionary that comes to my mind that can actually (sometimes) translate this kind of phrase (idioms/metaphors/metonyms) is linguee.com because it actually provides translations for whole phrases (and always shows you the results in the actual context). The context I am talking about is usually sentences / paragraphs. So in fact, the dictionary is based on parallel corpora gathered from many different internet sources, such as documents from the UN and so on. (The UN has tons of parallel documents for all the official UN languages). So, if you have NOT come across such a thing as a online dictionary for idioms/metaphors, would you think such a thing would be useful? Would you use it on a regular basis? I'm curious to hear what you think about it.