linguaholic

What an amazing thread! I would like to add one more：道。It is the word DAO. You probably know this word from the word Taoism and it means something like the (correct) way. However, sinologists usually don't translate the word as it has can have so many different meanings according to the context.

Well, recently there was this speech from Obama and there was this one guy interpreting the things Obama said into Sign Language and he got it all wrong, that was kinda weird! Has anyone of you seen this or at least heard about it?

Are you referring to the the cartoon version of 三國演義 or the regular TV Show? I have never seen the TV Show of 三國演義 but the cartoon 三國演義 and it was pretty cool as well.

Hi Eboran I am sure you are not that bad at (learning) languages! Anyway, we are here to support you! Happy New year! See you in the forums regards lingua

Another goal of mine is of course to make linguaholic.com more popular and to create/regroup the forums to everyone's need, maybe incorporate some new functions, and and and :grin:

Have you ever heard of Babelfish Machine Translation and if yes, what do you think about it in terms of quality and accuracy (maybe compared to Google Translate)? If you don't know Babelfish, this is the direct link to its machine translation service: http://www.babelfish.com/

The Latin section is up and running and is waiting for some nice new threads: http://linguaholic.com/study-latin/ Feel free to contribute :grin:

It really depends on the person and on the time you are actually investing to learn the language. I have seen a lot of foreigners in China and some of them have been living there for years and their Chinese was still awful. On the other hand I have also met foreigners that were almost fluent in Chinese after one year, as you pointed out. However, from my experience I can tell, that Taiwan is not the best environment to learn/study Chinese, as most of the people there are eager to talk/respond to you in English, rather than in Chinese. This is not (yet) the case in most of the places in Mainland China, mainly due to the fact that most people there still do not speak English (at all).

Dear Members and Chinese learners of Linguaholic.com I would like to wish you all a merry Christmas! (圣诞快乐) Here is a cute little youtube video for all of you hehe :grin:

Dear André Welcome to Linguaholic.com and Merry Christmas ! Thank you for this detailed introduction of yourself and your language learning plans. I hope you will have lots of fun around here ! See you in the forums

Hi Mark Welcome to Linguaholic.com and Merry Christmas :santa:

I just checked the homepage www.fmylife.com (www.viedemerde.fr) and I must say that it was pretty funny to read some of those short stories. However, I am wondering what kind of sense this makes? I don't know any of these people and therefore reading this kind of stories is getting boring in NO time. I don't think that this concept can be commercially successful (well maybe it is not meant to be commercially successful, then everything is ok hehe).

Hehe, me as well. Honestly, I think that Japanese without Kanji would not be so beautiful anymore :grin:

Well, yes! Kanji refer back to the Chinese Han-Dynasty, when characters have been unified and the first character dictionary (the famous Shuowen Jiezi) has been created. So basically, Kanji mean Han-Characters, as in 漢字 （in simplified script as used in mainland China = 汉字)

The Kanji of the year 2013 // Now official The Kanji of the year 2013 is 輪. The kanji 輪 (wa) is the counter for wheels or circles. This kanji was selected as Tokyo was selected as the location for the olympic summer games in 2020 referring the the olympic symbol of the 5 rings. Also, the sound of the kanji is the same as the Kanji 和 (peace). Let´s make a peaceful circle".

If you are interested on how Google Translate works exactly, have a look at this video. When it comes to machine translations, there are two big "systems: statistical machine translation and rule-based machine translation. Google Translated is based on "statistical machine translation".

Hier? En fait, hie j'ai travaillé le matin chez brack.ch. J'ai passé l'après-midi à la bibliothèque avec ma copine japonaise. Après avoir travaillé pour quelques heures (à la bibliothèque), on est aller boire un café à Zurich. Le soir, j'étais trop fatigué pour faire qulque chose de spécial. J'ai mangé avec toute ma famille et après je suis allé dormir :shy:

You are more than welcome Daimashin!

That's an other adorable story! A slighty different meaning of 葉公好龍 is: "to pretend to be fond of sth wile actually fearing it" or "ostensible fondness of sth one really fears", so it does not necessarily have to be a lie, it can also portray the circumstance where one adores something, but feels kind of scared about it at the same time.

You are welcome ssonicblue! The 把-structure is very useful and it is also a very common in Modern Mandarin Chinese. This kind of structure already existed in Ancient Chinese. In Ancient Chinese however, you would use the character 将 instead of 把 for this kind of sentence.

你说的是什么意思？

FluentU is really cool. We already had a chat on this subject here: http://linguaholic.com/chinese-links/fluentu/ After all, did you pay for the service? (as far as I can see, the basic service is for free, (you mentioned that in the title).

Hey Ssonicblue Welcome to linguaholic.com! I am studying Chinese as well and I have been in China six times so far. I studied Chinese there for one year and I am currently studying Chinese at the University of Zurich. If you have any questions regarding the study of Chinese, please let me know! I hope you will enjoy yourself here in the forums! best wishes Marcel

If you need help with a translation, just make a post in the translation section of the target language. I am sure some members will be happy to help you!

I will have a look into this and will give you an update about this "issue" as soon as possible. Thank you for asking about it!