linguaholic

Have you heard about this website here? http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/ It has the vocabulary for all the JLPT levels, hiragana and katakana charts, audio files and much more. I guess this is what you are searching for.

Most influential linguists // Ferdinand de Saussaure Ferdinand de Saussure (* Nov 26th 1857 – † Feb 22nd 1913) was a major Swiss linguist. He is sometimes also referred to as the founder of "modern linguistics". He was without any doubt one of the most influential authors of structuralism in the 20th century. Ferdinand de Saussure is most famous for theories about language. According to Saussure, the language consists of signs which express ideas. He generally regards language as a system of signs. In Saussure's point of view, linguistic signs are relational elements which are motivated by the need to differentiate them from other linguistic signs. What is more is that he explains that signs are not innate to things or concepts they mean. Thereby the form of a linguistic sign is an arbitrary convention. Keywords (terms) in Ferdinand de Saussure's language studies/theory are: langue (the language as a system of signs), parole (an explicit utterance in a language X), signifié(signified) and signifiant (signifier).

Phrases are limited in Chinese? What do you mean by saying that?

hey there Could you please tell me what the title of your post is supposed to be? I guess there is something wrong with it (some letters missing). Just let me know please and I will adjust it. regards linguaholic

Yes, I completely agree. The "design" of this approach is just amazing and it really makes you feel like: "aaaww, I want to learn those characters now!". I will definitely keep an eye on this homepage and see how it develops. I just discovered recently that their business has been "crowdfunded" and they collected more than 70'000 pounds for it! Amazing. It would be my dream to have a business like that!

I just watched some of the videos of OMG and I must say that this kind of video with audio in both English and Chinese can be quite useful. However, this is a little bit too "comical" for me, as she is trying soooo hard to be funny :=) Still, I can see how one could learn some Mandarin from those videos, I guess it is just not my cup of tea.

Have you been wondering how Google Translate works exactly? There is a nice little video on Youtube explaining the concept of Google Translate. Please have a look here:

Hey Charli Good to have you here on linguaholic.com There are many Spanish native speakers lurking around the forums here Don't hesitate to ask them for some specific Spanish phrases / words and so on. I am sure they are willing to help you :grin: kind regards lingua

Most beautiful french words / phrases Another french word, which is commonly cited as one of the most beautiful french words is "noir". It stands for black in English. You might know about "Le chat noir", (French pronunciation: ​[lə ʃa nwaʁ] ; French for "The Black Cat"), which was a nineteenth-century entertainment establishment, in the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris. Moreover you might have heard of "Le Pinot Noir", (French: [pino nwaʁ]), which is a black wine grape variety of the species Vitis vinifera. More beautiful french words and/or phrases anyone?

If you ask me, Japanese without Kanji would look kinda awful. Moreover, Kanji help to disambiguate sentences. Therefore, if you have a real interest in learning Japanese, just learn them. :grin:

Thank you for providing this interesting story about the 成语: 完璧歸趙 . The meaning of the 成语 : "完璧歸趙 " could also be formulated as: "return the jade intact to the State of Zhao - return sth. to its owner in perfect condition" or "return the jade annulus to Zhao; fig. to return something intact to its rightful owner."

I would like to provide another example sentence for this 成语 here: 塞翁失馬， 安知菲富？ literal meaning of 塞翁失馬: the old man lost his horse, but it all turned out for the best (idiom) figurative meaning: "a blessing in disguise"

Thank you for all your support ! We are very happy to see that lots of our forum members have a real interest in seeing this place grow!

Hi Astdua Welcome to linguaholic.com! Hopefully this forum will help you to reach new heights, then ! best wishes Lingua

I might add a Latin section in the next few days. We are now at 99 forums in total, so maybe we should make it 100 for Christmas :=)) :santa:

That's an interesting question. It's pretty hard to answer though, as different languages need different resources. For instance, Duolingo is pretty much useless for my Chinese studies, as they don't offer Chinese lessons (yet) :=) Therefore I would like to answer this "on a broader scale", not naming specific resources. The most important tools for me are: 1. Texts (all kind of different texts in the native language) 2. Dictionaries (Thesaurus, target language - native language, etymological dictionaries) 3. Spaced repetition tool (something like the program Mnemosyne) That are the most important tools for me (as the question was asking about tools, I am assuming you are solely talking about "material" and "online" tools.

If you are serious about studying Chinese, you would definitely have to learn the script as well. The script is both fascinating and beautiful. Moreover it is what unites China in terms of communication -->there is a vast amount of Chinese dialects in Mainland China and it often happens that people can not understand their counterpart (because of dialectal differences in language) -->this is where the script comes into play and if you can write you can just write down the sentence in Chinese and people will understand.

This is another way you could actually go about it, yes. However, learning the radicals at an early stage would also help you with your writing, because if you know all the radicals, you can basically already write all of the different components of chinese characters.

Sure, context and situation are crucial! My question was more related to correct Grammar though.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I learned in 文言 class that there is actually a word that consists of 4 times the character dragon 龍 and the meaning is garrulous / talkative. I can't write the character in pinyin as, obviously, it has not been included in the "character-set".

I love the story (history) of 成语！I am just really struggling when it comes to the actual use of them. How could I pack this 成语 in a sentence? Could I say something like, 你说什么？你不要指鹿为马！

That is a fascinating story Daimashin! Where did you get this from? Did you have to learn this in school (university). Could you please make sample sentence for me with this 成语。I am unsure how I could use it in a full sentence.! regards lingua

你好Daimashin. 我很高兴你来到linguaholic.com. 在这里会说中文的人还比较少 :grin: :frozen: 你的母语到底是广州话，对不对？

在瑞士情况差不多一样的。用微薄的人很少啊。在瑞士还有那个Wordpress比较普及的。

I do agree SpiralArchitect. However, I would like to mention that in English, talking about scientific writing, the tendency is still to keep it rather simple. In other languages, German for instance, scientific writers are always trying so hard to make every sentence as complex as possible and they prefer to use the most complicated words (trying hard not to use an easier word for the same thing).