linguaholic

I completely understand. I just did not know that 相 can also mean to show / reveal. I am well aware that chinese characters can have plenty of different meanings according to the context. In Classical Chinese for instance, one of the most important characters was 之 and it has more than seven different meanings. Another important character at that time was 為. In our classical Chinese book, this character has 16 different meanings in the second tone, and some more meanings in the 4th tone. I might start a new thread to let you know more about the use of 之 and 為 in Classical Chinese.

Hey Expressionism Welcome to Linguaholic.com! This forum is still very new, that is why some sections are still rather empty. However, we try our best to fill those sections with valuable content. :grin: Why not help us in doing so? If you have questions about Chinese, I will be glad to help you (I study Chinese at university). regards linguaholic

Shadowing -- A language learning method by Alexander Arguelles If you are interested to hear about a "new" language method, then you should have a look at the following link. It will provide you with detailed information about "Shadowing" http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing Let me know what you think about this method. If you already know the method and have been already using it, please share your experience !

I just stumbled upon a very interesting article : "Language skills deficit costs the UK £48bn a year". Please have a look for yourself! If you have a lack of motivation to learn (more) languages, you should definitely read this article! (especially if you are a UK citizen). Language skills deficit costs the UK £48bn a year http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/10/language-skills-deficit-costs-uk-economy

That's exactly what I am talking about. I can remember that our professor told us about this keyword feature as well! It's good fun to see the statistics then!

I am wondering how "our languages" will develop in time. Can you imagine how our languages will sound like in let's say 1'000 years? Which languages are going to survive and which languages might die out or will be in danger of dying out? Are tonal languages like Chinese gonna be less tonal or maybe even more tonal? (Chinese used to be a NON-tonal language in ancient times). What about the vocabulary and grammar/syntax of languages?

If you would like to polish your German-skills, you might want to read some German Newspapers online. The following link provides a comprehensive list with links to German (online) newspapers. http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/germany.htm

Would you like to read some german books online and totally free? Then you should check out the "Projekt Gutenberg". You can find a massive amount of free books there in GERMAN but also in other languages. Here you go: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Hey charahome I am happy to hear that you are enjoying yourself here in the forums! See you around!

A voice recorder only makes sense to me if you are about memorizing specific information. If you would just like to listen to the language, you could just turn on the (internet) radio in language X I guess, no? I recently used a voice recorder in my Classical Chinese class...However, I did this because our teacher is talking sooo much and is sharing soo much knowledge, so that it is impossible to write down everything. Like this, I can listen to the lecture again and make additional notes and moreover I can use it to prepare myself for the next exam (I had an exam in Classical Chinese today but there will be another one in a few month hehe).

Wow, interesting! I am wondering how you came up with the literal translation though. I do agree that 矛 isolated means Spear and 盾 isolated means Spear. But how about the other two characters? As far as I know 自 means self (what is more is that zi was originally a pictogram for nose) and 相 generally means "mutually". So how did you get it to mean "show"? is that maybe a compound word of 自 and 相 together (自相）？

Is Academia.edu the Facebook for intellectuals? I have recently discovered academia.edu. My Classical Chinese teacher at Uni is on this plattform and I am now following him on academia.edu. What do you think about Academia.edu? I personally think it is great, as there are so many professors, teachers and other people engaged in scientifical work (writing) on it. A lot of those people publish their scientifical papers directly on academia.edu and what's best is that many of those people upload papers there you can download FREE of charge.

We all know swear words in several languages, but which language has the best (most) swear words? I'm curious to hear your opinion about this.

My language goals for 2014 are: Further inrease my Chinese level and study some Japanese for my trip in April (going to Japan for 2 weeks). Moreover I hope I can pass my exams in computational linguistics in January 2014.

Oh you are talking about the funny Chinese post? I think a good mix of serious and funny stuff works best!

Definitely, Daimashin! Japanese has so many honorific expressions and phrases, it's incredible, but also heard to learn :santa:

I was wondering if we could get some more examples of "letters of application"? Please share some knowledge about this and tell us the "status quo" in your country.

Not so far peppers. We are much more active on Facebook. However, if you would like to get some recommendations for good langauge learning software, please let me know (moreover you could use the search function on linguaholic.com. There are many discussions about language learning software already

Absolutely DaBlink182! "It just depends on what your mother tongue is and what you grew up with." That is exactly what I thinking. However, I do think that some languages are much more complex than others, but in the end, the difficulty of language X is heavily depending on the background of person Y.

I would argue that a lot of idiomatic expressions that are in use today have a pretty long history. This makes "the etymological study" of idioms really interesting. How people come up with those idioms? That's a really difficult question. Still, I would say that most of the idioms make sense in one way or the other (at least at the time when they were invented but then later on, we might not be able to understand the "connection" of those "concepts" anymore)

Battle Royale, that was a really funny movie hehe. The Japanese title is (jap. バトル・ロワイアル, Batoru rowaiaru). What is Suicide Club about? I never heard about this one.

Hey Seville I hope you will have the chance to go to Japan with your family! I have been in Japan about 7 years ago and it was absolutely amazing. I do agree that your experience will be much "deeper"if you can speak the language. Most of the people there still do NOT speak English. This definitely holds true for older people (30 and above). I will go to visit Japan my with my family in 2014. I am super-excited to finally go back to "Wonderland - Japan".!

As we already have a subforum for all these languages now, I am going to close down this thread soon :grin:Hopefully that is ok for everyone :wacky:

You would have to tell us a little bit more about your motivation to learn Chinese. Please also tell us more about your ambitions in learning Chinese. Without that kind of information, It's almost impossible to give you an adequate answer.

As a Latin section has been requested by quite a few members, it is now online. At a later stage, we might put classical languages together in a new subforum called "classical languages" or so. Have fun in the new subforum and hopefully lots of interesting threads will be created in there. If there is someone who would like to moderate the latin section, please let me know. This person should have a (at least) a basic knowledge about Latin of course. Thank you everyone! regards PS: We now have 100 forums in total on linguaholic.com. Awesome!