linguaholic

It's an incredible homepage Miya. You can find more than 500'000 albums there. you can listen to all of them for free (streaming). You also find thousands of western songs, not only Chinese. Moreover, you can listen to countless radio stations. I am sure you will enjoy the page :grin:

你好Sam。欢迎来到linguaholic。嗯，你现在读配药学吗？真有意思！我是马塞尔。我是个瑞士人。我的爱好是学习语言，打乒乓球，还有听 （做） 音乐。 :karate:

you might have seen there is actually a thread about this topic: http://linguaholic.com/german-language-general-discussion-thread/do-you-think-german-sounds-'aggressive' Lots of different opinions on this :wacky:

You should be able to change this in your profile caparica007. If it does not work out, I can also do it for you. You would just need to let me know what kind of text you would like to see there :=) :grin:

Dear Lucy This is what the French Lounge is for. You can post a practice thread in there. The "french lounge" is the place to talk French (no other language is allowed there).

It just simply means "what is this?". :grin: You can use this phrase in all kind of situations? For instance, if your friend has something in his hand and you don't really know what it is you can just say: Qu'est-ce que c'est?

the modify button should be there..I changed it now to half an hour..please have a look after posting something if it is there for at least half an hour..I might change the "modify time" to "eternal" soon :wacky: regards

I'm gonna close it tomorrow, no worries. People are starting to post stuff that has already been discussed in different threads....but that's also a good sign as it shows that linguaholic.com grows fast and is getting bigger and bigger :grin:

Shall is often used in "law texts". It is very formal and it is almost never used in daily speech (that is how we learned it here in Switzerland).

Hey Hank I can not tell you how long it will take you to learn Chinese if you study two hours a day, but I can tell you something else: If you are serious about studying Chinese, you will definitely need to take classes and go to China for some time. If you are thinking about self-study (only), I am pretty sure it will not work out. All the people I know who are fluent in Chinese have one thing in common: they love this language and they have passion for it. It's a lot of hard work, trust me. It's fascinating as well though :grin:

hy bluntashell Level 5 would mean Level 5 in HSK (汉语水平考试). This is the most popular international Chinese test and you can do this test almost in every country in the world (takes place something like twice a year in most countries). I did this test about two years ago in China. At this time, I had probably studied Chinese for about 2-3 years, one year of those 3 years I was studying in Nanjing, China. So, if you study Chinese in your own country, I would say you will need 3 years to get to a decent level 5 (usually you would need to get a good grade in HSK 5 in order to be able to study a master in china...total points are 300, 180 is minimum and you would probably need something like 240). If you can go to China and study there, you can probably reach this level after 1,5 - 2 years. It's a crazy bunch of work to learn all the characters and learn how to write and in HSK 5 you will also need to read pretty difficult texts in a very short time. Still, if you have passion for languages and especially passion for Chinese, I am sure you will be able to pass it as well.

I have not heard about 牛郎織女 yet. I will try to find some time to read it though. ! First of all I will need to read several books for university :wacky: There are so many fascinating books that one could read, especially when it comes to Chinese History. Sooner or later I will have to read all the classics (some of them just because I'm curious and I have to read some at university). Our Chinese teacher recently told us about a book of 莊子. It sounded like an amazing book/story. It was something about him and a butterfly...about dream and/or reality. Can't remember the name though

Let me try: I can speak English, French, German and Chinese. I might go to the cinema tomorrow. May I help you ?

The film is called Gran Torino! It's a fantastic movie!

Well, I am not a native speaker of English and therefore I can only speak for non native-speakers, but I guess that is equally interesting :wacky: A lot of people (at least here in Switzerland) are having problems pronouncing "Pirates of the Caribbean" they put the stress on "beeeaan". Whereas the stress should be on the "ri" part of the word. Or maybe even both pronunciations are possible? I just checked the audio on dict.cc and there you can get audio samples for caribbean and I was surprised to find out that you can find both pronunciations. :frozen:

Hey Evapfromm It does not really translate into "Angry Burger" as Bürger is not Burger :=) but it's kinda close I have to admit :grin:

Chinese does not have a lot of grammar that is true, but I don't think you can call it easy just because of that. I would not say that Chinese is extremely difficult, but it is definitely one thing: "Time-consuming". You just need so much time to master all the characters and all the different combinations. Idioms and so called 成语 are another difficulty. And, as mentioned before, pronouncing the words is pretty hard and there are some people that just can't get the tones right, even after having studied Chinese for about 3-4 years!

Dear nkaujntses First of all, welcome to linguaholic.com! I am very excited about having a native hmong speaker here in the forums! I know very little about the hmong language(s) and I would love to learn more about it. If you could start a thread and write about your own language (for instance you could talk about the history, number of native speakers, grammar, writing script, topology, and so on) that would be incredible. Later on, I can also create a new sub forum for hmong languages if there is some interest for it! I'm very eager to learn more about it! :grin:

I heard that Norwegian is very easy to learn for europeans. For german speakers it is pretty easy to learn Dutch as well.

oh, thank you Daedalus! I did not realize that this thread is actually about the history of English, as I was just reading adventures of English and probably did not read the whole thread. Maybe it is also just that the forum is growing bigger and bigger and it get's harder and harder to retain the overview :=) Anyway, I'm gonna have a look at it now! Still it would be nice if we could at least name the "milestones" of the history of English here (summary of the most important steps).

Years ago I had to study the history of English. I still remember some bits about it, but most of it just vanished ;( I remember that the norman conquest has had a major impact on the English language. Moreover, I remember that the French language has been predominant in England for quite some time. I would be grateful if somebody could share some knowledge about the history of English!

I remember that somebody else already started a thread about code-switching; however this had to do with tagalog and English. I think this is an interesting question, therefore I would like to ask about this again, but in a more general way. Are you experiencing problems with code-switching? If you are unfamiliar with the term code-switching: Code-Switching means switching from one language to another. For instance, you might see your friend at the train station and you are talking in french to him/her and 5 minutes later you see another friend, who is only speaking Russian and you are starting a discussion in Russian (given the circumstance that you speak both languages of course). I am experiencing problems with code-switching when forced to switch from Chinese to French. I have the odd feeling that the "linguistic data" is somehow "saved" in the same regions of my brain, as I always mix up the two languages and I might start a sentence in french and then I almost end up saying the next word in french and so on. :frozen:

I would like to know if there are any other people here studying languages / linguistics at university? Also other majors/minors related to languages and linguistics are of interest in this thread! Let us know about your "language studies". I currently study Chinese and computational linguistics at the university of Zurich. I guess a lot of people might wonder what computational linguistics is all about. If this is the case, I will be happy to explain in more detail!

I read the novel 我叫刘跃进。It is a fascinating novel about the Chinese society, involving people from different backgrounds (rich people and very poor people). The plot is very complex and the story is intriguing and sometimes pretty funny. I would definitely recommend it! I just bought another book: "The banquet bug" by Geling Yan 赴宴者 and I have to read this novel for my chinese studies at university. If you want to know about the story of 我叫刘跃进， please consult this link here: http://baike.baidu.com/link?url=U_8N2JJGFTrgGz3aummtxhPg0eLedE0eVFduum4guaKqZ4J0nJcUTrcESb620on75o-N4mjkGNvDcQmO39WDvK If you need some info about the banquet bug, please just type it in on google and you will find lots of search results. Please keep in mind that the info on the first link are all in Chinese :=)

Dear Community members In this post I would just like to encourage all of you to get some more members "on board"! I am sure all of you know some people interested in languages! So please tell them about our community here at linguaholic.com and ask them to join/register! The good thing about this will be that we can all benefit from having more members here, as more members also mean: more native speakers of different languages, more discussions and quicker answers to threads, and and and. Let's "unite" all the linguists, language enthusiasts and language buffs here on linguaholic.com! Thank you for your support! linguaholic