linguaholic

Dear Laura Oh, that is a funny coincidence! I just suggested Victor Hugo's "Les misérables" in one of the French Threads. It is an amazing book, that's certainly true! And if you can read it in French, it's perfect.

That story about KIFLA and KIFLICHKA is interesting, Topcho! If you come to Switzerland one day, I might "cook" some KIFLA for you :=)

I love to browse through tons of different language related resources: blogs, forums, "linguistic papers" and so on. Lately I discovered that there are some relatively new words that get used ALL the time in relation with languages and language learning. Well, the words are not "new" but the usage of them could be called "new". There are mainly two words that I literally see everywhere now: hack(s) and gamify. So language blogs offer language hacks (sometimes absurd things like learning a language in 20 days) and language Apps apparently gamify the process of learning a language. Have you noticed this trend as well or are there maybe some other words that you came across recently (related to language learning/linguistics).

oh, so this means you will not be active on linguaholic.com for one whole week Topcho ? :sweating:

I would like to recommend "Les misérables" by Victor Hugo. This is by no means an easy book to read but it is just beautifully written and therefore it is a "must-read". Give it a go Topcha, you will love it :angel:

ok, thank you topcho :grin: Actually it was me who awarded you the karma hehe :angel:

hey there if you make a mistake, the word should automatically be underlined in red. When you right-click on the word you should be able to see some suggestions. Therefore it is not necessary that you "enable" or click on spell check and then revise it in a new windows. If this does not work for you, please let me know! regards M

This is a good suggestion. It is very easy for me to create new subforums and I will definitely think about something like that. I will just need to make sure that this is not affecting search engine rankings in a bad way. However, I am pretty sure that we can do something like that in the near future. Stay tuned and thank you very much for this great suggestion!

Dear Topcha and Czarownica There is currently no way to see who awarded you some karma. I will need to make some modifications to the code of the forum to make this possible. I will either do that or I will implement a feature that will make it possible to give karma for specific posts. I will need some time for this but as I would like to make you happy, I will try my best :grin:

I do agree Czarownica :angel:

Hey SarahRTW, I think it should be the other way around: Words ending with /ize/ is American English and words ending in /ise/ is British English. regards M

Hey Deyvion Thank you so much :angel: I love "hosting" this forum, it is so much fun. I would like to let you know that there will be new "features" soon on linguaholic.com. I am currently working on a new rank system that will replace the medals. It's gonna be much more fun and above all, it will be language-related :wacky: Moreover, in September or October, there will be some sort of competition and the most active (or let's say the people, who are providing the best content) will be awarded with some nice prizes. Can't say more than that right now :wacky: regards Marcel

I have an ipad and a Mac (yes I know). Therefore I do not need to install anything, I can just choose chinese simplified or traditional in the language settings and I can type pinyin and write chinese characters with the finger (on iphone and ipad) without any problems. Works like a charm :=) I also got a ZTE mobile phone and there I guess I am using something like google pinyin (not perfectly sure though). I used to have an iphone and there, of course, you do not need to install something in order to be able to type pinyin and write characters in "handwriting mode".

This topic has been moved to Chinese Characters // 汉字. [iurl]http://linguaholic.com/index.php?topic=346.0[/iurl]

From now on, I would like to introduce a new chinese character every day. Today is day 1, so I would like to start with one of the most frequent Chinese characters. This is the chinese character 的 (de). The traditional character looks the same (also 的). The meaning is "possessive article" Some sample sentences for you and yours: 我的妈妈四十八岁。 // My mother is 48 years old. 她的哥哥很聪明。 // My brother is very intelligent 我的书在哪儿？ // Where is my book? . Feel free to provide more definitions and sample sentences for the character 的。

Wow, that's interesting! I am sure I would not be able to pronounce this sentence correctly :=) I would love to hear an audio file containing this sentence If there is none, maybe you could record one pojokers, hehe.

I used to play the Chinese version : "My Chinese Coach". It's a pretty funny game and sort of "gamifies" learning. I guess the games are the more or less the same for all the different languages. It was good fun for a while, but I remember that at the time when I played this game it was still pretty expensive. I had it on my Nintendo DS back in the days :grin:

The first (language) lessons are always the most interesting ones xD Especially when learning a new language, it is pretty easy (at least for me) to get super-excited about it, as you will learn lots of different words and every new word that you learned is like a BIG achievement. After some time, motivation will probably drop a little bit and learning new words and sentence structures are not as motivating anymore as at the very beginning--->at least this is my experience :grin: I did not mean to discourage you though! Hopefully you have lots of motivation to learn this beautiful and poetic language!

I think we can start this kind of game under the general language discussion thread as "an experiment" and see how it goes. If it is good fun, I can think about implementing a new subforum for that kind of thing. Would you be so kind and start a thread then ? (topcha or deyvion) :grin:

yea, I see. but could you please provide an example for that kind of game? regards

This is an interesting suggestion. Could you please provide an example for such a game? kind regards Marcel

In German (Swiss-German as well), we also have the frog-related idiom:=) So we say "einen Frosch im Hals haben" in German meaning to have a frog in the throat. In Swiss German this would be written (in my dialect) "ä Frosch im Haus ha". However, I would like to point out that there is NO such thing as correct spelling/writing in Swiss German. We just write the words however we want to

Thank you for that amazing post. It was really amusing to read through this and see how the "final version" of "They are Chinese" looks like. The breakdown is very useful and enabled me to get some more insight into this fascinating language. So, the word for "They are Chinese" that you just provided is actually Chippewa or Ojibwe? Or is this even one language with two different names? This might sound like a stupid question but I have not yet heard about this (these) language (languages).

Cool thread! I have recently seen someone posting this kind of thing on facebook and already then I was thinking that it was pretty cool. I googled it today and I found this homepage here: http://4pics1word-answers.com/ I guess this is what the fuzz is all about :wacky: You can play the game online there as well. Some of them are rather difficult if you ask me :frozen:

hehe, you are most welcome. That's cool. Please feel like at home here in the forums :=) If you have any questions about languages that have no subforum yet, please just post it in the general language discussion thread. There are numerous members here that speak some languages that are not yet "forumized" (yes, I just invented this word right now haha). I am off to bed now, as I have to get up very early tomorrow. Hope you will have a good time here. :angel: