linguaholic

I am really happy to hear that you are enjoying the badges! My friend drew all of those badges for linguaholic.com. It was pretty hard work and also not for free...but I guess it was worth it !!!

Dear Kristina Thank you for joining linguaholic.com! You will get lots of support in here and hopefully you will be able to learn a lot about languages here! see you in the threads! warm regards lingua

Hmm, that is not an easy question. I spent hundreds of dollars for Chinese, whereas I only spent a few bucks for French and English. However, I am actually willing to spend quite a lot of money for learning languages if necessary, as studying languages has always been a priority for me. At this day and age, however, you can find a massive amount of information on the internet about almost any language and it is not really necessary anymore to spend a lot of money for language learning tools. I really like to buy Flashcards for all the languages that I am learning. Digital Flashcards are nice as well, but I really prefer printed flash cards. It's nice to have something in your hands while doing flashcards :grin:

I do this sometimes as well, but as I am living in Switzerland, I really need to be careful about what language I am speaking. We speak many languages in Switzerland and in my city 40 % of all the people are foreigners. However, there are not many Asians in my city, so I often end up speaking Chinese (not to myself but on the phone for instance) and usually there is no one around that can speak/understand this language. Chinese is not very popular yet in Switzerland. As far as I know it is much more popular in the States and also in other european languages, such as Italy and Germany!

Dear Joe Welcome to linguaholic.com! I am sure you will be able to get some decent info about Italian and many different languages here in the forums. What languages are you fluent in if I may ask? kind regards Linguaholic

Hey Mr. Barcode I am happy to see that you joined our community here on www.linguaholic.com and I am also happy to see that you seem to enjoy our smileys as much as we do :grin: Believe it or not, Anime / Japanese TV-Series seem to be a pretty popular reason for people to learn Japanese. Alone on linguaholic.com, there are about a dozen people who indicated this very reason. There really must be something magic about those Japanese animes....:=)

I have some experience with Textbroker. However, I did not apply as a content writer there, I was myself hiring people for my Chinese blog http://www.der-chinese.com. I have really been pleased with the results. Most of the texts I got from context writers from that platform were excellent and well researched. Textbroker is great in terms of quality and also in terms of "flexibility". You can browse a large database of users and it is fairly easy to find a qualified person for your needs. You can "pick" content providers according to their quality of writing (they use a star-rating system that goes from 1 star up to 5 stars). If you are in need of a very well-written text with perfect grammar, you can go for 5 stars and usually you get a decent text. Of course you need to pay more for a five-star content writer than for a content writer with less stars. Another great feature about Textbroker is that it is "SEO-ready". What does that mean? It means that you can define keywords and keyword density for your texts (content writers that will take care about the text will have to stick to those predefined "settings") and they will have to make sure to implement your keywords when writing your text. After the job is done you will also have the opportunity to review the text and ask for improvements if you are not satisfied with the overall results. Only then will you have to pay for the text. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can refuse to pay.

Languages are really different when it comes to "numbers". In german, for instance, we count like stated here: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-count-in-german.html It is actually pretty similar to the way people count in English. ---> The first 9 (10) digits are the "basic" numbers ("words") in the counting system and then you just add those elements in one way or the other to create the numbers 11-X. Whereas in German you say "Vierundzwanzig" for 24, you say twenty-four in English, so in german you first have the small number and then the bigger one (4 und 20) where in English you first got the bigger number and then the smaller number (20 (and) 4). In Chinese, on the other hand, the counting system is pretty different. The biggest difference in counting in the Chinese counting system is the fact, that you have a unit of 10'000 (万). So if you are going to say 40'000 you are basically saying 4 x 10'000 (40'000 in Chinese = 四万) and not as in German/English 40 x 1000 (40'000 in English being forty-thousand and "Vierzigtausend" in German). Please let us know how the counting system works in your language(s)!

Hey there littlebelgianwriter I am honored to see that another Polyglot joined our language learning community! I hope you can find lots of useful information here on linguaholic and of course it would be well appreciated if you could share some knowledge (help some of the other members) while you are "on the hunt" for new language-related infos :wacky:

There are a lot of repetitions in the song...that's nothing special though as almost all pop songs are constructed by this "hit formula" :=) What does "oppa" mean exactly Joo? Maybe you wrote the meaning somewhere in this thread but I could not find it. I would really like to know if it means something special or not :grin:

Actually, I have never heard about 2NE1 ;( The video is cute...and one of those girls is wearing really weird white "sunglasses". :=) The word for lipstick is 립스틱, right? You say it is pronounced the same as in English right? However, could you please tell me how it is written in Hangeul? Thank you !

Dear all I would just like to inform you that we now got a new language exchange subforum! If you would like to brush up your foreign language skills, get yourself a language buddy in the language learning subforum!!! the link is : http://linguaholic.com/language-exchange-corner/

Hi everyone If you are looking for a language exchange partner, please follow these easy & simple rules: 1. Title of your message Please post first a short description about what you are searching for, then post the desired Target Language (abbreviation is TL) followed by your native language (NL). Lastly, please indicate your preferred means of communication (Skype, Wechat, Facebook, etc...). Example: Looking for Spanish language buddy / TL: Spanish / NL: English / Skype, Wechat, Facebook 2. Message (post) content: In the body of your message, please provide some more detail about what you are searching for exactly. Please indicate how you would like to be contacted in the first place (private message on linguaholic.com, open reply in the current thread and so on) and if you can offer (speak) more languages than indicated in the message title, please provide some more info about that as well.

Hi there I am looking after a Chinese language partner. As indicated in the title, my native language is German. So if you are a Chinese native speaker and would like to practice your german in return, please reply to this message here and/or send me a private message :grin: I have Skype, Wechat and Facebook. Preferred method of communication: Skype & Wechat :grin:

Hey there Thank you for joining our community! I will be happy to assist you in your language studies of German, French and Chinese. I can speak all of them and also write in all of them of course :=) Hopefully you will have lots of fun here!

It is great to have you back on linguaholic.com deyvion! :grin: hope your exams were/are a success!

Dear Groselha I am actually not studying Finnish but I still have a big interest in this language. I have been in Finland 5 times and I enjoyed every single bit about this wonderful country. Every time we went there, we rent a big house near a lake and then we were just chilling for 1 or 2 weeks and read books, go fishing, enjoying sauna, and eat the whole day :=) So far I just learned the words kiitos for "thank you" and the word "maito" for milk. Oh and maybe the word for motor is motorii? I would love to hear more about this complex language and it would be great if you could share some basics about the finnish language here on linguaholic.com!

Thank you very much for this interesting introduction Li Gao. :grin: However, I have to point out that there are some points that need to be clarified. You wrote that "In ancient China, there was no alphabet". While this is of course true, it still implicitly says that there is a Chinese alphabet now, which of course is not the case. Later on you are talking about Chinese phonetic alphabet. This term is also somewhat confusing. Wikipedia defines Chinese Pinyin as follows: "Pinyin, formally Hanyu Pinyin, is the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet in China, Taiwan,[1] and Singapore." Moreover, you are saying "Four tones can be dated from the ancient Chinese language." This is also somewhat problematic, as Chinese used to be a NON-tonal language. The tones evolved over time and ancient Chinese (well we would have to define first what is meant by saying Ancient Chinese) was a NON-tonal language. Later on you are saying that there is no nominalization in Chinese. That is also not 100 % accurate as you have for instance the character 者, which can nominalize "phrases".

Dear Joo Thank you for that great post about the different sentence types in Korean. I was wondering if you could provide an example for each of the sentence types and also give us the English translation for the sample sentences. That would be great! :grin:

Piece of cake is a funny one. I first learned this one about 15 years ago when I played an Ego-Shooter game called Duke Nukem...In the beginning of the game you had to choose the difficulty level and the easiest one was called "Piece of Cake" :=)

Sometimes I spend about 10 hours learning language(s) a day. This might sound crazy but my Major is Chinese, therefore it does make sense, right ? :=) A few years ago I studied 800 characters in 3 weeks while learning about 10 hours for 3 weeks in my holidays. I had lots of fun though :grin:

I usually study study languages on my own. However, when I first started to learn Chinese, I got myself a private tutor to get the pronunciation right. I could only afford this because I was in China at that time. Private tutors can be incredibly cheap there and it is/was well worth the money! When it comes to pronunciation in Chinese, you will DEFINITELY use some help of a native speaker. It is almost impossible to get the tones right without any help (lots of people do think they master the tones when speaking after a tape or so..but in fact their pronunciation might be still awful.

Thank you for providing this neat little story. In Pleco, this 成语 has three different meanings: 1. Meaning : look for a steed wit the aid of its picture 2. try to find sth. by following up a clue 3. deal with (or handle) a matter in a mechanical way. Therefore, also both of the meanings you are mentioned are included in those 3 definitions about 安圖索驥。 Especially the last character is interesting. I have never seen it before. Must be a quite rare character I guess (驥). So you said it is used for horses of good breed? Guess that must be a pretty old character then :=)

That's great Daimashin and I can confirm that (your style in writing hehe). :grin:Your posts about 成语 have all been very informative and descriptive.

Definitely. Still, to get your message across in German, it is not extremely important that you get all those genders right. But if you reach for perfection, it is definitely a must, no question about that. It's possibly the same with measure words 量词 in Chinese. It is not absolutely necessary to master them but unless you do so, you will never be considered "proficient" in this language. However, most of the foreigners I know just know about the most basic 量词 like 个, 本 and 两.