linguaholic

@Isaac Yes, that is true. In German, if you say Ich bin heiss, it definitely means that you are horny :=), so you should say "Ich habe heiss". @BWL That is correct as well. "Schnee von gestern" is a very common idiom and we use it all the time. It is very popular in Switzerland as well and we use it here in Swiss-German :=) "Verschlafenes Nest" as a metaphorical expression for a sleepy area/town sounds more experimental but I can easily see how this could appear in German texts. "Verschlafenes Nest" could be used for a lot of different things too (in a metaphorical way).

A pretty funny thing I come across once in a while is Asian people writing "tried" instead of "tired". I don't know why but I have seen that sooo many times. I am just wondering why this error happens so frequently. I do not see a special difficulty with the spelling of the word "tired". My guess is that both of them sound pretty similar when spoken...and it must have to do with the letter R :=) If you heard (Asian) people writing (saying) "tried" instead of "tired" please let me know..I am really wondering if I am the only one

Just for your information, guys, the new subforum "study french" is now online and is waiting to be fed with some interesting content :=))) :grin:. There are quite a lot of french speaking people on linguaholic.com already, so I hope we can the discussions going as soon as possible.

So I can feel honored that you do not seem to be so bored of this forum yet :=)) and it is definitely getting better and better :=)

Dear nonsiccus Please have a look here: (you will find plenty of resources in there-->should answer your question) http://linguaholic.com/chinese-links/ thank you.

Thank you for sharing this funny story Czarownica I'm going to ask ask my parents tonight about my first words..but I am pretty sure that in my case, my first words were something trivial like mum or dad. However, a few years later, according to my mum, I had a talent to pronounce (to roll) the letter R at a very young age , (often used in swiss-german), so I was always annoying my mother with R-words :=)) May I ask you why your nickname is witch? Is there a story behind it or is it just random? I'm curious about it

Welcome Deyvion It's cool to have some people from Sweden here. It is great that your environment is so international . It's a great opportunity to learn many languages !!! You might be able to learn some different ones here on linguaholic.com

You might have to ask your parents about this, as you probably won't remember I did not yet ask my parents about it but I guess it must have been something like Mum or Dad..hopefully it was something a little bit more interesting xD I will ask my parents later today and will let you know. I am excited to hear about your first words :=) It would also be interesting to hear at which age it actually happened.

It is all just a matter of time anyway. Rest assured that I will open up many more subforums. Eventually there are going to be subforums for many many other languages. As you mentioned already, French might be the more reasonable choice at the moment. Ironically, in the very beginning of linguaholic.com, there was a french subforum, but at that time nobody was willing to contribute. I am sure it is different now though. Korean will have its own subforum sooner or later for sure..I can already promise that

if you want I can post a list where you can see how many posts you will need. However I am already working on a new reward system (or lets say additional reward system)..it's gonna be cool and much more language related.don't want to say too much about it yet :angel: Moreover I am planning to do some prize competitions here on linguaholic.com. I would like to award some really cool prizes for active people (that post quality content) in my forum. I am not yet sure about the criterias though. It might be something random, but maybe also something based on post count and/or quality of posts. Prizes could be some great books about languages/linguistics, maybe some vouchers for amazon and so on. In any case, stay tuned :karate: If you have some inspiring ideas about this kind of topic, please let me know !!

there is also a firefox extension (maybe also supports different browser) which is called peraperakun (or perakun). It does the same thing as rikaichan. You can also get this for Chinese. The dictionary is not only in Japanese-English. You can also get Japanese-German as far as I know and maybe even different language combinations. The extension is free of course.

You are probably right Czarownica. There are not many people here (yet) that are studying Thai. However, I am pretty sure you are not the only one that is interested in it. BWL probably even speaks some Thai. However, we might integrate that subforum later! Let the community decide on this one.

I am studying Chinese at the moment and I got the following question to solve: (I need to fill in the correct word for the following sentence) 从前，有个人丢了一把夫子。他怀疑是领据家的孩子偷了。就暗暗地主意那个孩子。他看那个孩子走地姿势，象是偷了斧子地样子；他____那个孩子了神色，他象是偷了斧子的样子。。。。。 Now there are 4 options to choose from: 1. 观看 2. 观察 3. 考验 4. 测验 Can anybody tell me what the right answer is here and why? (explain the difference why it is answer x and not y) thank you for having a look at this.

I think it is best to slowly increase the number of subforums on linguaholic.com. It does not make sense to create 100's of subforums (for every language that comes to mind) as the activity in those forums would be far too low and having empty forums all around is not exactly a good thing to have in a forum:=) So please, dear language learners, choose one of the above languages, and the winner will get a new subforum (with all the subcategories like grammar, teaching, vocabulary and so on). Voting will be up for the next two weeks. :wacky:

Hi Amatenshi Welcoem to linguaholic.com!! :karate: I have been studying Japanese as well, but just for one semester at University. At the time I was able to write the kana and some Kanji ( I knew many of them already from Chinese) but I really struggled with the Japanese grammar so I stopped studying Japanese for the moment. I just couldn't do a double bachelor degree Japanese / Chinese. Was a little blt too much. However, I regret that I quit studying Japanese as it is a very interesting language! I will probably have the chance to go to Japan in April and until then I would like to get back in the mood for studying Japanese :doubtful:

Welcome, Coricopat! It happens to most of us that we study some languages and can't keep up with them at some point :frozen: it doesn't matter though..it is just important that you will find the motivation to keep on going later on..maybe you just needed a break. Anyway, hopefully this forum can be of some use to you! you will find lots of motivated language learners here, that is for sure

very interesting indeed, Marie. It would be interesting to compare languages in terms of idiomatic expressions about the weather. We already touched upon that topic and I think we should continuing doin g so...maybe it would be even better to start a new thread for this.

and the conceptual metatphor brings us to the incredible work of George Lakoff & Mark Johnson: "Metaphors we live by". If you have a deep interest in metaphors, you will need to read this. It is like the holy grail in literature about metaphors.

well, in german you can say that today it is "Hundewetter", which literally translates to today it is dog weather. The meaning of this is of course that the weather is bad today. I am sure there are more expressions about the weather in German including animals...some deriving from English though (my guess).

The "Fraktur" is not used anymore at School in Germany/Switzerland/Austria etc. The last time I have seen it was actually in a dictionary from 1909 (duden) that I got from a second hand shop. At first sight it looks a little bit difficult to read with those old alphabet letters...however, after some time it is very easy to decipher as the letters are just slighty different from the standard alphabet letters that are used today. I also asked my parents about this topic and they assured me that they were still using the "Fraktur" alphabet letters in school when they were young. But now in 2013, it is definitely not in use anymore and maybe just occasionally looked at for historical purposes as mentioned above. It does not need to be teached as it is pretty easy to recognize the "fraktur letters" as there are only minor differences compared to the standard alphabet letters used at present.

I would like to share a little "language hack" with the community. I use(d) this "hack" a lot during my translation studies at university. When writing a translation or some other kind of text, you are sometimes not sure about a collocation ( a collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance, it is a subgroup of phrasemes), then, what you can do on google is the following: We take the collocation "powerful computer" as an example: So let's say you are not sure if it is correct in English to say a powerful computer. What you can do is insert powerful computer with brackets (very important) on google and press the search button. You will see that this will return 433'000 search results containing the exact sequence of "powerful computers". Maybe you were asking yourself if the right collocation would maybe be "strong computers". Type this one on Google as well and Google will only return 9'590 search results. Therefore, you just found out that powerful computers seems to be a legit collocation, whereas strong computers is not (9'000 search results is nothing and the results returned are not of good quality and most of the content is probably written from non-native english speakers). I use this function all the time for any kind of translations. It can really help you a lot to find out if a certain combination of words is correct and widely used or not. Unless it is a very very specific term, Google will find thousands of "examples" for all kind of word combinations and if it doesn't, it just simply means that you are most probably wrong !! You can further narrow down the search results by adding more search strings at the end. so if you would just like to google the results in a certain country you can add "uk" (do not use the brackets just put it at the end of your search string) or another country in the end and Google will just return the search results for websites of that country. This is tremendously useful if you would like, for instance, to find out if a certain expression is British English or American English.

hey amatenshi, have you heard of the App called Kanjibox? It is an amazing app for studying Kanji offering great content and really "gamifies" studying characters. In case you did not come across this App, you should give it a go!

I have always been using the "japanese" dictionary app and would definitely recommend it to anybody. As far as I can remember it is not free of charge but the app is superb so you shouldn't mind to spend a few bucks on it :=) http://japaneseapp.com/

Dear all I was wondering if any of you have some good suggestions on how to learn/understand 成语。Maybe also just some useful information about the "syntax" of 成语。 One thing that helped me to understand better the meaning of chinese idioms is the fact that a friend of mine told me that in Chinese idioms, you often use 之 as the literary equivalent of 的. This was really helpful as 之 appears in so many chengyu and if you know that it stands for 的, it can help you a lot in understanding a certain 成语。I was wondering if there are some other hints like this one that can facilitate the process of studying chinese idioms. Maybe there are also some rules about the "character order" within a chengyu? something like...if character X stands in position Y, it usually means Z. If someone could "shed some light" on this, I would be most grateful.

I do agree Brian :=) I will come up with some more sophisticated ones very soon. Stay tuned