linguaholic

I would love to know if someone is familiar with Speech-to-Text software like Dragon Naturally Speaking? Dragon naturally speaking is a speech recognition software and it basically writes down what you are saying. I am sure everybody knows about Siri (iphone). Siri as well let's you dictate a text and writes it down for you (for instance writes an sms for you). I tried this kind of system a few years ago and I was already amazed how good it was. Please share your experience.

Word reference is a great resource. Most of the people use its search engine I guess, but the forums are great as well. Why? Well, that's pretty simple. If you browse in the forum you will notice that there are so many users and so many posts, it's just ridiculous. Total post count at the moment there is: 13,355,093 Members: almost 600'000 ! Let's pray to God that linguaholic.com will get that big one day :grin: If you would like to check out the forum of this great language learning page, here you go: http://forum.wordreference.com/

What does "flip the bird" mean Jet Li ? I have a guess but I am not sure at all :=)

I am also in love with Haruki Murakami. I am currently reading 1Q84 and it is great. It is a little bit long though :=) Therefore I would suggest reading Kafka on the shore. I had lots of fun reading it.

Actually, I couldn't agree more. However you should not neglect Katakana and especially Kanji for too long. Still, it is a good idea to start with Hiragana.

Who are the most influential linguists of the past and the present? Some of the most important ones are: Ferdinand de Saussure Noam Chomsky Paul Grice I will briefly introduce the above-mentioned linguists when I get home from university. I am curious to hear about your favorite (most influential) linguists.

Thanks for mentioning this Daedalus. There is also another thread somewhere about animal-related onomatopoeia. You can easily find it by searching for animal onomatopoeia. Please note: If you are using the search function you should first go back to the home page (if you don't do that you can't find all the relevant search results).

I am happy to see that so many members are in love with that quote thread. This thread is actually one of the oldest threads on linguaholic.com :grin: See you in the forums silverhoop :karate:

hehe :=) I like the way you displayed the kanji (making it size 36pt). That's a great way and I will adapt this method from now on.

Hi ChanellG Thank you very much for joining our community! Hopefully this forum will be able to assist you in your language learning endeavors! You will find lots of useful links here and many eager language learners :grin: See you in the forums!

Thank you very much for sharing this Preya! It certainly sounds very plausible what you are saying! I am really happy that I know something about Guyanese-Creole now. I did not have a clue about it before your introduction. There are so many things one can learn about languages and I just love to hear and learn about languages. The history and "development" of Creole languages is certainly something really interesting!

A few days ago, in my classical chinese class, our teacher introduced a chinese character with 64 strokes: It is actually one character, however it consists of four times the element dragon. The character is pronounced zhe2 (second tone) and it meant talkative, garrulous in ancient times.

great topic, Silverhoop. I kinda like the following palindrome : "Dammit, I'm mad!" I am thinking of some palindromes in german. Might gonna add them later!

I think everyone got a favorite Kanji. I would love to hear about your favorite character. If possible, please share some information about the character and it would come in handy if you could provide an example sentence that comes along with your favorite character! As you can see below, my favorite kanji is the kanji for dragon. I really like the shape of it. example: 龍の年 // year of the dragon

A lot of people here requested this feature JoanMcWench, therefore I added a special mod. Why would it bother you to see who awarded you the karma? Please let me know.

By default, the spell checker is set on American English. However, I do not have a preference for American English at all. I would just like that all the users are satisfied, therefore I will try and see if I can enable British English as well! I will keep you updated. thank you for that nice input.

I am definitely interested in it but I can't speak it. It would be nice if you could give me (us) a short introduction about those languages. I would love to learn some basics!

oh yes...Tuneln Radio is great for all kind of languages (radio stations in different languages)! I recommend it as well! I got it as an iphone app.

It seems less people know about this than I thought! I'll need to apologize to my family for the silly look I shot them about not knowing of 莊子. The butterfly thing is often called 莊周夢蝶, which basically entails dreaming he was a butterfly, waking up, then wondering if there was any distinction between himself and the butterfly. absolutely, that was it. I can't wait to read this story. I would love to read it in Chinese; however, this will be rather difficult. I might buy the chinese version and a translation at the same time and then I will just read both. Thank you for shedding some light on this butterfly matter :grin: and a very warm welcome to linguaholic.com (haven't seen you in the forums yet hehe).

Language Learning Forums Some other forums that have been mentioned in several forums are unilang.org, how-to-learn-any-language and so the webpage wordreference.com has been mentioned as well. The latter has a great language forum with 100'000s of posts. Other than that, my favorite language learning forum (after linguaholic of course hehe) is unilang.org. There are lots of interesting topics on it and there are forums for about any language. If you have not heard about this great language learning forum, you should give it a try. You might want to tell the people there to have a look on linguaholic.com as wel just kidding. One last forum just came to mind: http://www.chinese-forums.com/ If you are a serious about learning Chinese, you might wanna check out this cool forum. I found this website to be most helpful and there are a lot of very advanced chinese learners on it (some of them obviously being native speakers of Mandarin/Cantonese). So, are you using other language learning forums other than linguaholic.com? If yes, please name them :=)

[quote Yes, this one is very interesting because I remember that even normal everyday expressions like "thank you" or 谢谢 have an ancient origin in feudal China. 文言 provides a lot of very common expressions with unique and interesting etymologies that reflect thousands of years of Chinese culture and literature. Absolutely. Actually there is a ton of characters still in use today, which have already been used in ancient china in the so called 甲骨文。Most of those characters had a different form in the 甲骨文 of course. As you mentioned previously (as far as I can remember), 馬上 is also a very old expression. Moreover, the compound 朋友 is one of the oldest chinese compounds. The character peng2 is actually referring to cowry shells (and not as one might think being related to the moon or flesh). Cowry shells have been for trade (money) in very ancient times.

I am glad to hear that you appreciate it as well. There has been a major update a few days ago and the Pleco app looks even better now. There's just one thing that really bothers me: I can't seem to find some of the character information anymore. In older versions, you could easily find the notion about the radical of a certain character. Since the new update, I can't find this info anymore. I just hope it is still displayed somewhere as it would make no sense at all to "delete" this crucial information. If you know where I can find the radical information in the newest version, please let me know! (Please be aware that I am not talking about searching characters by radicals...this possibility still exists and there has been no change about this in the newest version).

I did not forget about implementing this kind of thing. It's definitely "in the pipeline" and will be added soon.

I am happy to see that you would like to see some more language sections. I just added Latin and Greek and I will think about a more adequate listing for some of the languages (might gonna add a section for classical languages or so). For the moment being, I guess it is good enough to add them like other regular languages and I will be able to move the forums later on (in fact this is just a matter of a few seconds to move the forums to other categories). Hopefully there will be lots of new interesting threads in those forums! Thank you very much for the suggestions!

As I use a Mac and and iphone, I just always use the apple standard input methods for Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. They work like a charm (mainly using handwriting input and pinyin)