linguaholic

Hey there! I am glad you joined the forum. Languages is what this place here is all about, so we are always very happy to welcome new "language enthusiasts" Hope you had a good start here! If you got any questions or need any help here on linguaholic.com, please let me know! Let's share the knowledge best wishes Marcel

Hi Nina Thank you for joining linguaholic.com. I am very pleased to see that someone from Bulgaria registered on the forum. You are probably the first person from this country, so if we have some questions about Bulgarian, we will definitely ask you first hehe :wacky: I am happy to see that you introduced yourself by talking about your "linguistic background", as this is what linguaholic.com is all about. :angel: So thank you for the short introduction and hopefully see you in one or better several of the forums very soon regards Marcel

I have to admit that I do not know about how google translate works exactly, however there is already a discussion going on about google translate here: http://linguaholic.com/english-translations/what-are-your-thoughts-on-google-translate Could you please ask this question there again? Thanks a lot!

Online Language Learning Resources: FRENCH http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/ http://french.about.com/ http://www.thefrenchcorner.net/ http://ielanguages.com/frenchindex.html http://www.lepointdufle.net/ http://www.thefrenchexperiment.com/ http://www.frenchlearner.com/ http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/ http://french.speak7.com/ http://www.conjugation-fr.com/

Two years ago I was studying Chinese in Nanjing, China (南京）。 I have been living on campus of 南京大学 for some months and in this time I have seen so many foreigners engaging in teaching activities. There were so many chinese students that were looking for (native) English speakers, you wouldn't believe....Even me, (as non-native speaker of English) I got asked very frequently about teaching English to chinese students/children. Sometimes when simply hanging out in the city, some Chinese people would approach me and ask me if I could teach their children :frozen: So if you ask me, it is very very easy to find a job as an English teacher in China, at least in cities like Nanjing (it might be more difficult in Beijing and Shanghai of course). What really surprised me is that the salary many foreigners got from teaching English as pretty decent as well. For a simple job it seemed to be pretty common to get something like 80-100 yuan an hour. A friend of mine (half asian, half british) even got some VIP teaching jobs and she earned about 300 yuan or more for just one hour. In a city like Nanjing, where the cost of living is very low, earning 80-100 yuan an hour is pretty good. I would like to mention here that most of the foreigners that were teaching English in Nanjing at that time, they did NOT have a working visa/permit. So generally speaking, they were working on an illegal basis. However, nobody seemed to care about it. I have many many friends that have been teaching English all over China and there as well, teaching English without a working Visa seems to be no problem at all.

awesome Czarownica! I might go on a holiday in Korea in January, until then I will definitely need to be able to write Hangeul effortlessly Your post really inspired me.

This is not an easy question to answer. It always depends on what you need the language for. If you are studying Chinese and want to use it in your job, it is something different than just studying it for fun and maybe be able to speak a word or two when going to travel in China. Still, if you are serious about studying Chinese and maintaining a good level of Chinese, I would say 5-10 hours studying /reviewing a week should at least be enough to maintain your level, considering your level is intermediate.

As we do have a new french subforum now I am going to move this topic over there in the general language discussion about French! See you there :angel:

I would like to talk about slang words in your country here. In every country, there must be some special slang words or some sort of vocabulary that is commonly used amongst young people. Let me start this thread by telling you about some very common (slang) words that young people use in Switzerland. There is a word called "huärä", which literally means "prostitute" or "whore". However, this word is very regularly used by young people in Switzerland to mean "very, extremely". Is is therefore used as an adverb. I can give you some examples: "huarä schön" means very beautiful "huarä guet" means very good "huarä wit wäg" means "so far away" Another thing young Swiss people use all the time (me included when I was younger haha) is a word called "mann". Generally speaking, mann (in capital letters though) stands for "Man" in English. However, young people use this here at the end of almost every sentence. Whatever you say, you can basically put mann at the end. It is just considered to be cool to speak like this but "mann" has no meaning at all when used like this. A lot of young foreigners like to use this as well here in Switzerland. Moreover I would say that it is most prominent with young people that like "Hip Hop Music:=)", but many others use it very regularly as well. I'm curious to hear about (YOUR) slang words in your country, (mann) :wacky:

I did check this out yesterday with my brother and we really enjoyed it. The video was well done, the conversations did make sense and learning more about the conversations and characters was easy and intuitive. I just hope that the other languages are gonna be online soon as well. In the meantime Czarownica, you can use www.duolingo.com (in case you do not know it yet).

Hey Pojokers We do use "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" in German as well. In German it is "Einem geschenkten Gaul, schaut man nicht ins Maul". The meaning is exactly the same but the nice thing in german is that the two nouns sound like a rhyme --->Gaul / Maul

yes, "set" has a lot of definitions / meanings. I also came across this when I was googling for the right answer to this question. I am still quite surprised that some people here reckon that the f-Word has the most meanings. It does have quite a lot of meanings and is used in many occasions but still, compared to others, the use still seems rather limited to me!

人为什么会做梦，梦有什么意义，人类 49 了近千年也还没有找到答案. This is an HSK 5 question of a mock exam for the reading part. You have to fill in the gap (49) with one of the following: 想象，观察，思考 or 幻想。 In this case the right answer was 思考. I am just wondering if somebody can explain to me why 观察 is not correct here. I was very sure that 想象 and 幻想 are wrong here but I thought that 观察 could be the correct answer as well.

I really do agree with this. It is still very interesting to hear what people have to say about this question. Cases are something pretty difficult in language learning, I do agree as well. I guess this is why you say that Finnish is hard to learn, because it has a lot of different cases. I have been in Finland six times and I also think that it is a pretty tough language to learn. Finish just sounds so random to me and the composition of different letters making up words just looks so at...for me, it just looks like someone randomly put together some letters :=)))

I agree that English can be a true window to the world, however, in my opinion there is also a "dark side" about English being so ubiquitous: it rules out other languages and this is, at least for me, very very sad. Language diversity is really beautiful and in this world, where English is literally everywhere, I am always pleased to find some places/regions where English is not spoken or at least not very common/popular. It also makes studying languages much in some cases, because if you are going to a country where people do not speak/understand English, you will probably need to speak to them in your "target language" and this will boost your skills in that language a lot. Even better if you do not have any English-speaking friends around you...this way, you will be fluent in any kind of language in NO TIME (that is a little bit exaggerated but you know what I mean).

The English word with the most meanings / definitions I am wondering what English word has the most different meanings/definitions. My vote would probably go for the verb "to get". If you include the phrasal verbs, this verb has an incredible amount of meanings.

I am well aware that there are huge differences when it comes to letters of applications in different languages/countries. In Germany for example, when writing a letter of application, you will talk about the reason why you think you are the "best candidate" for the job, you will write some sort of summary about your skills and your jobs and you will also write about why it would be beneficial for company X to choose YOU instead of someone else. I am willing to share a complete sample letter later on. I am already looking forward to compare the different versions later on. It will be very interesting to see how they are different from each other. Of course I am not only speaking about the different kind of "content" you will find in the application letters of a specific language, but also about the different linguistic features, the register and the specific vocabulary.

What's the world's most difficult language? I know that there is no definite answer to this but I still think it is interesting to talk about it. In my opinion, Japanese is pretty tough. I was really struggling with Japanese Grammar, honorific forms and different registers and the different pronunciations of words. German would also make my top 3, however it is pretty hard to tell for me as German is my native language. One of my "polyglot friends" would probably vote for Russian. He speaks about ten languages and in his opinion, Russian is the most difficult language that he came across until now. Please share your opinion on this and also tell us why you think that language X is the most difficult language.

I will continue my chinese studies at University soon and I will research about this and if I got the chance I will ask my 文言 professor about it. He definitely knows that kind of thing. Interesting question mate!!

hehe :grin:

In Swiss German we say Mammi (Mother) and Pappi (Father), at least in my dialect (swiss-german, region of Bern). In some other regions in Switzerland they might say something like Mueti (Mother) and Vati (Father).

Hi Netra Glad to see you joined the forum! Feel yourself at home here :=) Please do not forget to upload an avatar in your profile and it would be nice if you could tell us what languages you speak and which languages you would like to learn/study (you can provide this information in the profile section). If there is anything I can do for you, let me knowk, :angel:

I think I am up for the challenge as well. Can you write Gangnam Style in Hangeul now ? :=))

Looks like a funny way to study the alphabet. I just started with Korean and I guess this can be of some help to me. Definitely gonna dig this. Thank you Czarownica

From time to time you have to take it easy with language learning and just have some fun with random stuff. Here we go: (just click on the attachment picture)