linguaholic

Dear Samson Welcome to linguaholic.com! It's really nice to see some more people from africa joining my language learning forum! I hope you will have lots of fun in here and if there is anything I can do for you, please just let me know! See you in the threads regards lingua

Thank you for all that answers. I am very happy to see that I am not the only one having this problem :=) Sometimes, reading out things can be helpful, as Qamra mentioned, but I guess this just works with words or very short texts. :grin:

Hey Ailene Really nice to meet you ! Happy New Year 2014 and hopefully you will find lots of useful information here on linguaholic.com! See you in the threads best wishes lingua

It is not just you, j-evemstar. Many others are struggling with Keigo as well, as you can see here. http://linguaholic.com/japanese-language-general-discussion-thread/what-aspect-of-learning-japanese-has-been-the-most-challenging-for-you/ It really must be one of the most difficult aspects of the Japanese language.

Hey Champollion That's an interesting idiom. I have never heard about it before. Thank you for explaining its roots and giving its definition. I will try to use that one next time I'm on a bus, which is packed with people.

Hey Sputniker Welcome to linguaholic.com! Great avatar you got there :grin: I hope you have lots of fun here in the forums ! I am sure some members can help you out regarding with questions in English, Spanish, German and Japanese. See in the threads! regards lingua

I was wondering if you are able to read out loud AND understand a text at the same time? Whenever I had to read out loud in school I was just unable to really understand what I was saying. This must have to do with the fact that I was always concentrating on the pronunciation. Still, I was kinda shocked to discover after reading out loud a text that I just couldn't remember what I was reading (at all).

In terms of native speakers it is definitely Mandarin-Chinese. In terms of the most spoken language worldwide it is most certainly English? no? Everything else would really surprise me :=)

On my Mac, I always use Pinyin. On my iPhone, I sometimes use Handwriting, but most of the time I am using Pinyin as well. Sometimes I force myself to handwrite characters on the phone, as it is really important to write chinese characters once in a while...if not, you will soon end up as an illiterate

Hey Antiquarian Those Latin-songs that you provided are really awesome! How good is your Latin though? Do you understand all of the lyrics? I never learned latin in school, therefore I have some trouble to understand the lyrics. Still, it really sounds nice !

This happened to me as well when I was living in China for one year. Everyday I just spoke Chinese and English and I started to forget how to speak in my native tongue (which is Swiss-German). However, when Swiss People are writing E-mails we mostly write in high german and after some time in China I really had some problems to formulate correct german sentences. This might also have to do with the fact that I had to write a lot of Chinese Sentences and they are kinda different in terms of Grammar and especially morphology.

So how exactly does the usage of love differ in Portuguese then? I would love to hear some examples because I am unaware of those differences.

This is mostly true but not all of the radicals are proper characters when "standing alone". Still, I would agree that it makes sense to start with the radicals and then proceed with different characters.

Hey Rapano! Thank you for joinging Linguaholic.com. You will find lots of useful information about the English Language here in the forums! Moreover, we got many many English Native Speakers here as well and I am sure they are willing to help you to improve your English (and in return you can probably teach them some Italian) You like Rap Music? I really like Rap music as well :indian:

Oh, I would definitely agree! Non-native speakers of language X, favorably speakers of your mother langue have been through the SAME problems in language X as you are (or will be). Therefore, it makes sense that they can explain you (sometimes) things better than native speakers of language X. This especially holds true for grammar and writing, I agree with that as well. For some matters, as speaking and pronunciation, it might come in handy to have a native-speaker as a teacher, as their pronunciation/speaking is obviously perfect.

Moreover, there is always a button called "Notify", which you can find at the beginning of ANY thread. if you click on this button, you will get notified after someone posted a reply in this very same thread. regards

Hey Limbo Thank you. I wish you a happy new year 2014 as well! Hope you will be able to get your skills in Russian to the next level. Thank you for joining linguaholic.com! See you in the forums. regards lingua

I would just like to point out here that there is of course no Chinese alphabet. Please be careful with your terminology. Baburra is referring to the same thing as pandandesign, namely Pinyin. Please note that is spelled Pinyin and not Pinying. Pinyin (拼音） is the official phonetic system for transcribing the sound of Chinese characters into Latin script, and as the others have pointed out here, it is indeed a helpful "device" (mainly for foreigners) to learn the language.

What do mean by saying graphic description? Are you talking about metaphorical/idiomatic expressions? Please specify, thank you :grin:

You are right Daimashin. Anyway, I do not have time for this at the moment, but after my exams I might add a character or too a day and provide some sample sentences for each character. I will most probably stick with easy (high frequency) characters first, that's a good idea.

hmm, I doubt that JohnSword but I like the idea as I am studying Chinese at university

Bob, I would love to hear what you have to say about your statement: "Chinese phrases are limited". I am not sure what you mean by saying this. I have been studying Chinese for a long time and I am not sure I would agree with this. Please elaborate on this :grin: regards lingua

It's a really difficult question to answer and I guess there is no good answer to it. As others have mentioned, it really depends on the person and it also highly depends on your aims/goals. One thing that can be annoying when studying too many languages is the fact, that you will not be able to maintain the level you achieved in each of the languages. If you speak more than let's say 6 languages, it will be really really hard to keep up your skills in each of those languages as you might not have enough time to speak them on a regular basis..but even then..this is maybe not even your goal/aim, so that would be fine too then :=) :emo:

I am sure some of you know Ferdinand de Saussaure! You must have heard about him, don't you? :shy:

Some more beautiful quotes about Language: "Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see" [by Mark Twain] "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." by [Ronald Reagan] "Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." by [Paul Tillich] "Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." by [William Butler Yeats] "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." by [Ludwig Wittgenstein]