linguaholic

No, this is real. I am studying ancient Chinese and at that time this would have been a grammatically correct sentence. I will give you a hint: the character 之 at that time had a lot of different meanings. It could be a pronoun, an object, a verb, and even an adjective. So if you know all these meanings of 之, you can reconstruct the meaning of this sentence.

I have not heard about 日有所思，夜有所梦 yet, but this will certainly help me to remember this kind of thing. 感谢你。

Dear Mate amargo Thank you for making corrections! That is exactly what this section is for. I am sorry to interrupt the discussion guys, please feel free to go on :grin:

English Bird Idioms / Metaphors Lovely thread Laura! I can't wait to add some more bird-related idioms / metaphors. Here are some: 'free as a bird' (Meaning: pretty much self-explanatory) an early bird (Meaning: someone that gets up early in the morning) kill two birds with one stone (Meaning: to manage to do two things at the same time instead of just one) A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush (Meaning: It's better to have a lesser but certain advantage than the possibility of a greater one that may come to nothing.

I can respect your opinion on this, however I do think that collapsing the sub forums help a lot. Reducing the number of sub forums has just been suggested by very few people, therefore I am not considering the size of the (sub) forum being a problem right now. Still, i might eliminate the teaching sub forums of every language, as it is rarely used and does not make that much sense (I was never really fond of this section however some people requested it in the past).

It is a fact that Kanji are best learned\memorized by writing them down again and again. No other learning method can replace this process. Research has shown several times that handwriting wires the brain for learning. So, to give an answer to the initial question: YES. Handwriting is important when it comes to learning\memorizing\recognizing Kanji.

I guess our member BWL might be interested in it, as he also speaks Malay :grin:

hmm....I don't know a lot about flash games. I will inform myself about it. If there are free "language flash games" available, I will think about implementing a section like this. Moreover I will have to find out how difficult it would be to implement this kind of thing.

Different languages have different syntactic structures, there is no doubt about this. However, as other people have already mentioned, a noun phrase like "the red car" where the order of the elements are "article+attributive adjective+noun" is a very common structure used in many different languages. In German, for instance, one would also say "Das rote Auto" or in Chinese you would say ”一辆红色的车“, so two more languages that are following the above-mentioned structure within a noun phrase. 车 means car, so the noun is placed after the adjective as well. Same for literary Chinese, where you would say 白虎, meaning the white tiger.

Dear whatupswags As there was already a thread (more than one in fact) about DuoLingo, I merged the two topics and you can continue to talk about the great website DuoLingo.

Dear Amy Thank you for joining linguaholic.com You are studying Korean? That's great. Feel free to share some knowledge in the Korean sub forum :=) See you in the forums. Hope you will have fun here!

Pleco Chinese Dictionary App Pleco is amazing. I used this dictionary for several years now and it has always been my primary dictionary. I bought almost all of the expansions and they are great as well. My favorite "expansions" are the the handwriting module (basic handwriting, not in full screen though, has always remained a free feature) and the flashcard application. The latter offers a ton of great functions and most importantly it lets you handwrite characters after the initial question (for example the word in English)and then, by tipping on the screen, you can can display the answer (character, pinyin, definition and so on). You also have the possibility to buy "dictionary expansions". I bought the ABC Chinese dictionary and it was well worth the money. When checking a word, it is a matter of seconds to switch between the different dictionaries entries (inside pleco of course) and like this you always have several definitions and explanations for all the words you are looking for. This comes in very handy if you are looking up difficult things like 成语 or complex characters, which have a lot of different meanings (and there are plenty in Chinese, trust me). Pleco is the Number One dictionary for the ambitious language learner and if you do not have cash for the extras, you should at least download the basic application (the basic dictionary features are all free!) Last but not least, I would like to mention that I am not working for Pleco or something. I am just truly loving this dictionary :grin:

Welcome Anastasia! We will be glad to assist you! I am sure you will be able to pick up lots of "language hacks" here on linguaholic.com :grin: best wishes Marcel

I have not taken the GMAT exam but I had a look for some good study books/resources and I stumpled upon this one here. Seems to be a pretty useful and massive study ressource: http://www.amazon.com/Kaplan-GMAT-Premier-Practice-Tests/dp/161865053X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383320313&sr=8-1&keywords=GMAT+2014+premier

I am having problems with the pronunciation of words starting with "th". I hate to say words like "thread" or "throbbing" :grin:

Studying Chinese by listening to Chinese music is somewhat problematic. Why? Well that's simple: Chinese is a tonal language and it is very crucial that you get the tones right as different tones = different meaning. So the problem is pretty straight-forward: while singing, the tones are neglected (obviously) and therefore I hold the view that it is really difficult to learn from Chinese songs, especially if you are a beginner. If your level is intermediate, things look a little bit better and you might be able to learn some new vocabulary from songs. Still, it is not a very effective method to learn Chinese (at least not in my opinion!).

The most challenging aspect for me is Japanese Grammar and Japanese honorific forms. I am not struggling with Kanji as I already know most of the meanings from Chinese :=) There are a lot of very helpful websites when it comes to learning Kanji. Please browse the Japanese forums and you you will be able to find very helpful resources.

hi all please note that this topic has indeed been discussed already. I will therefore merge the topics if possible

In terms of Grammar, Chinese is actually pretty easy. The Chinese language almost entirely lacks inflection, which results in word forms only having one grammatical form (typically this is the case!)in. In order to express different verb tenses you usually just use particles. Studying all the characters is another thing and is indeed very time-consuming. However, the accurate pronunciation of the words and syllables is probably the most challenging aspect when it comes to learning Mandarin Chinese (and also Cantonese of course, as Cantonese has even more tones than Mandarin). An interesting fact about Chinese is that in ancient times (talking about Classical Chinese), the Chinese languages was not tonal (therefore having no tones at that time). By the way, the Grammar at this time was really different as well. However, a lot of Chinese characters that we use today have already been used in very ancient times (sometimes having another meaning or a slightly different meaning than now). The character 正 for instance has been used in ancient times to count groups of 5. So if you wrote down 正正正正 the meaning would have been 20. This method of counting things is still used in China up to the present day. Of course this is not the regular method for counting things but on some occasions people still use it. I am willing to tell you more about 文言 in the chinese forums. If you have questions, please let me know :grin:.

Oh you mean Chihiro (Studio Ghibli), that's such a lovely film! I should try to watch it in Japanese as well.

This question has been asked several times already. Please use the search function and check whether a topic has already been discussed or not before posting new threads. Thank you very much!

Please note that this kind of question has already been discussed in this thread here: http://linguaholic.com/general-discussion/why-do-you-want-to-learn-another-language/ Please post your thoughts in there! thank you (I am going to close this thread soon)

It is almost identical and you should not encounter any problems. There are some minor differences though. You can learn about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French regards lingua

the medal system is pretty straight-forward-->It is entirely based on post count, which basically means: more posts, more medals. :karate:

You are most welcome :grin: