linguaholic

It looks like many members would like to see a subforum like this...so guess what? I'm gonna do this straight away..the subforum(s) will be online later tonight or the latest by tomorrow! regards Marcel

well, there are already a few french native speakers on here and the number will definitely be increasing. My french is not that bad as well, I might be able to teach you a thing or two :=)

Exting Languages #1, Ubykh Today I would like to raise your awareness for one of far too many extinct languages: The language is called Ubykh and the last native speaker known to date is Tevfiq Esenç who died in 1992 (88 years old at that time). Some facts about Ubykh The Ubykh language was a language of the Caucasus, where it was traditinoally spoken around Sochi on the Black Sea coast. The language is related to Adyghe, Abkhaz and Kabardian. All those relatives survived till today and they are spoken in situ around the northern shores of the Black Sea and the northern borders of Gerogie. Why did the language die out? After a century of warfare, the Russian invasion of Circassia in 1864 led to the „clearance“ of the 50'000 Ubykh speakers. The survivors were moving into the lands of the Ottoman empire and the remaining Ubykh ultimately settled some villages by the Sea of Marmara, Haci Osman and some other places not so far south of Instanbul in Turkey. Characteristics of the language Ubykh Ubyk is a highly agglutinative language. What is an agglutinative language? Wikipedia defines it as follows: „In agglutinative languages, each affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive", "past tense", "plural", etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone). Additionally, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes do not become fused with others, and do not change form conditioned by others.“ You will find the full article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language So, let's get back to the topic. Ubykh, as mentioned previously is a highly agglutinative language and therefore Ubykh contains very long words that have the value of sentences: For example, there is the word : šek'aajəfanamət which means „we shall not be able to go back“. Moreover the language has a lot of different consonants (in total 83, as mentioned) but only a few vowels, to be more specific, only 2 ! At this point I would like to mention the valuable contribution about an other highly agglutinative language by our global administrator "BWL. You should have a look at it to get a better feeling for "agglutinative languages": http://linguaholic.com/general-discussion/the-world's-most-difficult-language-your-opinion/

I would like to share with you an interesting list (from Wikipedia) showing all the languages that actually have more than 100 million native speakers. Does this correspond to what you were thinking in the first place? Just click on the picture and it will display in a bigger size.

I am happy to announce that we got a new karma description mod on linguaholic.com. Some members asked me what this karma thing is all about and some have been a little bit disappointed that it was not possible to see who (which member) awarded you with some karma. This is now possible. To see your karma statistics (awarded karma and also the karma you gave to others) simply log in on linguaholic.com and then click on profile on the top of the page and choose "summary". Then, on the left side of the page you will see two new links, "Who changed my karma" and "Whose karma have I changed". If you click on those ones, you can find your karma statistics. You will also find the link to the respective topics there (as you might be interested to know for which post/thread you got the karma). Hopefully you like the new mod! please let me know! regards Marcel

If you ask me, it really depends on the language and also on the person. In German, I would go for "writing". In Chinese, I am struggling most with Listening. It is not very surprising, as Chinese is a tonal language and you need to listen very very carefully in order to understand. Writing in Chinese is definitely the most time-consuming activity, however I do not think that it is particularly difficult.

I am sure that it is possible. Of course it will be a little bit more difficult to learn it compared to learning a language at a very young age. Nonetheless, I know MANY people, who learned a new language at a fairly old age (50+ or even 60+). I would like to give you specific example: I study Chinese and Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich. In our class last year, there was a charming old lady, about 65 years old, that started learning Chinese with me. She was actually doing pretty well and by now, she almost finished her bachelor degree in Sinology. When I was in China, I also met a very old Japanese guy (maybe more than 70 years old) and he was also studying Chinese in China at the same university as me. In this case, I do not know exactly about his level in Chinese, however I admired him, that he still had so much passion about learning a new language! I can name some more examples if necessary :=) If you ask me, learning a new language is always possible, all you will need are three things: long-time motivation, dedication and above all, PASSION.

That's interesting Czarownica :=) However, I think some Swiss-German dialects are much rougher than the usual "standard german", aka "Hochdeutsch".

oh really? That's kinda funny. Yes, it is definitely my brother. My brother also owns hablaa.com. If you don't know it already, check it out. It offers an amazing variety of languages (for translation). You can even translate words from German to Swiss-German.

From a linguistic perspective, we would have to ask ourselves if there really is such a thing as a synonym. There are of course words that almost mean the same, however, each word got a special "feel" and touch" to it. Every word also got its own connotation, either neutral, positive or negative. Wikipedia defines connotation as follows: "A connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries, in addition to the word's or phrase's explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation." In English, two words that are really close in meaning are for example "start" and "begin". In my opinion, their connotation is also almost the same!

There are some words I hate to pronounce in English. One of those examples is the word "thread". I just always feel stupid when pronouncing this word, as I know that I can not pronounce it very well

I don't know why but so many people reckon that German sounds aggressive. When having a normal conversation in German (in China), there were quite often some people (other foreigners) asking me if we got an argument or something. I personally think that German can sound quite rough at times, however it does not sound that aggressive to me.

Sure wowtgp! I am sorry that I did not make myself clear here! So what I have in mind is to create a place where one could ask for a language buddy. So, for instance, someone who is studying Korean probably would like to make some korean friends. So this kind of forum would enable them to ask (and hopefully find) some language exchange partners (people who speak korean in this case here) In this forum, members who are searching a language exchange partner could just write something like this: "Hey, my name is Marcel, I am 28 years old and I am currently studying Korean. I would love to make some Korean friends in order to practice speaking some more Korean. My skype name is: xxx and my msn address is xxxxx. Please add me if you have some interest in language exchange. I can teach you German and French in return!" You got me now wowtgp??? :wacky: Hopefully yes regards Marcel

Is Couscous really an English Word?

Hey Cinderr The most important thing is that you have some real interest in talking about languages and language learning. As long as this is the case, there is no reason why I should ban you from linguaholic.com :grin:. If you need help to choose your "second language", let me know.

"Swag" is even getting popular here in Switzerland amongst young people and kids listening mainly to Hip Hop music :=) Another things teenagers like to use here (swiss youth and especially the foreigners) is "Ig schwöre". It means "I swear" in English. So they start all kind of sentences with "I swear": Some Examples: "I swear, the party yesterday was crazy." "I swear, my brother is much better than yours in playing table tennis". Honestly, the "I swear" thing often does not make sense at all:=) They just randomly use it for everything =)

Hi Daniel When I hear you talking about a study program abroad (in Japan), I really get jealous. I would love to do something like this (again hehe). However, I will go to Japan with my family in April, that's already great and I am really looking forward to it. Hopefully you can give us some nice tips and tricks about how to learn and improve Japanese! Of course I hope you will have fun here in the forums as well! If there is anything I can do for you, let me know Daniel.

When I was in China for a year, some friends and also my mother visited me there. In Nanjing, the city where I studied for a year, most people do not speak English at all. Without having some knowledge in Chinese, it is really hard to get by. So my friends and my mother was happy that I could organise all kind of things in Chinese, as they could not communicate at all with most of the people there. :wacky:

First of all I would like to point out that I respect any language. Of course there are languages that you like more and languages that you probably like a little bit less :=) I newer grew fond of the sound of Cantonese. It is a little bit too melodic for me. I really enjoy Mandarin Chinese but Cantonese is maybe not the next language I am going to "target", as I do not like the sound of it very much. Still, as I already speak Mandarin Chinese it would be very interesting to study Cantonese as well.

Today, I will introduce two new characters, as I did not have time to upload a new one yesterday. Let us start with the character 是, which stands for the verb "to be" in English. (Click on the "second" sequence picture and you will see the sequence in "zoom mode".) Sample sentences: 他是我的朋友。 // He is my friend. 你是不是德国人？ // You are from Germany, right? // Are you German? 今天是母亲66岁生日。// Today it is my mother's 66 Lionel Messi 是世界上最好的足球运动员。 // Lionel Messi is the best football player in the world.

I was wondering if someone would be interested in having a language exchange subforum for every language? In this forum, people that are interested in the language could ask for a language exchange in language X and then exchange e-mail address, Skype, MSN and so on. Let me know what you think about it. regards Linguaholic

I would like to share some Swiss-German with you here: This is actually a youtube contribution from my brother: He is "translating" or let's say pronouncing some easy German words (animals) in Swiss-German. Enjoy

That would be lovely. I will really miss your posts hehe :shy: I have been in Croatia as well once...it's really beautiful! I am sure you will have a great time there.

Hi Sarah I'm very glad that you joined the "linguaholic.com family" and would like to thank you for all the great posts and the threads that you created here. It seems that you really like "figurative language" and rhetorical figures. So we definitely have something in common :grin:

Hey Sarah It's nice to see that you are also interested in "Figurative Language". I would like to add some more examples for the rhetoric figure: "paradox". "You can save money by spending it." "A wise fool" "I can resist anything but temptation." by Oscar Wilde "I must be cruel to be kind." (Hamlet, Shakespeare)