linguaholic

I can very well understand your reasoning Medza. Icelandic must be very fascinating. If you could share some knowledge about this "exotic" language, I would be most grateful! I am pretty sure other people would love to learn about it as well.

It is indeed a very valuable homepage. You should also check out www.omniglot.com It has a lot useful information about various alphabets and other writing scripts. Very lovely and useful!

The korean culture is getting really popular in China as well. However some Chinese people still don't like Koreans that much..one reason for that is that apparently, some Koreans claimed that Confucius is Korean hehe:=)

I agree that mastering the slang of a language shows to a certain extent that you are about to "master" a language. It is the same with jokes. if you can get jokes and irony in foreign languages, your skills must be pretty decent :=)

The good thing about studying Chinese in China is that MOST people on the mainland do not speak English. If you are not located in one of the few big cities like Shanghai and Beijing, there are just a few people that actually do speak English. This really makes language immersion much easier...you will be forced to speak Chinese all the time, while: shopping, eating, going out, etc.). When I was in Taiwan for a couple of weeks I did not improve my Chinese at all, as they were always answering me (I was speaking in Chinese whenever possible) in English. That was kinda 麻烦。

Hi there The medals are based on post counts. Therefore, to get more of them, you will just need to make more posts :=) The medals do not have a specific meaning ----> :grin:

dear laura thank you for joining linguaholic.com. If you have any questions regarding german, let me know or open up a thread in the german study forum. We have quite a lot of german native speakers and we will be glad to assist you :karate: regards Marcel

Thank you for providing that link. I am well aware of this very sad issue. My brother once gave me a book about language extinction (for my birthday) and it is shocking to see all those beautiful languages fading away. As you already pointed out, some languages are almost extinct and are just spoken by a handful of people. In my book, you can even find a language that is just spoken by no more than two people! This is very sad and we should try hard to keep all those beautiful languages alive!

Dear Angelica thank you for registering on linguaholic.com. you are most welcome. You are majoring in technical communication? This sounds really interesting. We do have this major as well in Switzerland. I studied translation at university and there were quite a lot of translators focusing on technical communication. I was also thinking about it, as there are far too many poorly translated manuals out there :=) I am well aware that "designing" or maybe "translating" manuals is just one of many things you can do in technical communication, but I personally think that it is a very interesting topic.

As you have probably already noticed, I created some new custom fields. On the one hand you can now insert your native language and on the other hand you have a new profile field for languages that you are already fluent in. I hope that does the trick. If not, let me know and we will further investigate on that issue.

I honestly do not have an other example of keigo on my fingertips ( However, I would like to point out that the honorific language is one reasons why I personally think that Japanese is much harder than Chinese. In Chinese, of course there are also different registers, but not to the extent as it is the case in Japanese. As far as I know korean is also pretty demanding when it comes to the use of different registers (honorific forms are highly developed in Korean as well). What is interesting about Korean is the korean script, aka Hangul (Hangeul). It is said to be the most logical and probably most practical alphabet ever created. It would be interesting to have some native Korean speakers in here to discuss this topic. We would certainly have to open a new thread for that. This thread is reserved for "keigo" of course.

suki desu ne hopefully they while work on the links and make this complete one day.

As demanded, I created new subforums for teaching for every individual language. I hope that meets your requests! If not, please let me know! I am happy you are willing to contribute to make this place even more awesome! Thank you so much for the suggestions.

Hey Deyvion Thank you for that suggestion. At the moment, there are are just subforums for a couple of languages, that is true. However, the long-term goal of this website is definitely to expand this list with many other languages. The problem is that if you have 150 subforums and not that much content (this website is new, therefore it is no wonder that it takes some time) it will "scare people away". This is why I decided to just create a few subforums to begin with and then if the demand for new subforums will arise, create new ones. For the time being, I thought we could post all questions related to other languages in the general discussion thread (at the top of the forum) and then, if there is a certain amount of posts related to a specific language, I will be most happy to create a new subforum and move the topics accordingly. However, I do like your suggestions and maybe we could make a first step already. What about me creating a new custom profile field for "languages that you already know" and maybe" one more for "native language". This field would appear on the left side for every post that you are doing. It would be in the same place where you can now see the "Currently Studying" field. Maybe this is even what you meant? I was not perfectly sure what you mean by saying starting "a new thread". Anyway, please let me know what you think about my suggestion and of course you are welcome to tell me more about your original/inital suggestion. regards linguaholic

are you talking about something like this BWL?

I agree BWL.But of course, Rosetta Stone also comes with audio...still, there are so many websites that offer audio lessons for free as well, so I would still not go with Rosetta Stone, unless you get it as a gift from your mother or so :=) The pronunciation in Chinese, especially the // z, zh, j, q, c // sounds are really a great difficulty for foreign learners of Chinese..also Europeans are struggling with this, trust me:=) However, if you can speak whole sentences, the ambiguity of your messages drastically decline, even if your tones and the pronunciation is not perfect. If you just say a word to someone, then of course, your tones and pronounciation needs to be perfect in order to get the message across.

hi there As far as I know, both are possible: canceled OR cancelled. Canceled is supposed to be American English and cancelled is the correct form in British/Canadian/Australian English. The American Webster dictionary gives you the following for the verb to cancel: 1 can·cel verb \ˈkan(t)-səl\ can·celed or can·celled // can·cel·ing or can·cel·ling However, I also know some people from the US who prefer to use cancelled. Maybe it is a "regional thing" in the US.

I just stumpled upon another ad...this one being more funny..nothing very complex on a linguistic point of view..still, you might enjoy it, therefore I am willing to share :=)

hey all I would like to share here some nice ad's that use "fancy language" (metaphors, idioms) and so on in the ad's. Sometimes when I walk on the streets, I see a really good ad that keeps me thinking. This one here for example, you see the sentence (Die spannendsten Streifen laufen gar nicht im Kino) Unfortunately this is not in English, therefore I am trying to give you a translation / explanation: The sentence: "Die spannendsten Streifen laufen gar nicht im Kino" could be roughly translated as "The most interesting stripes are (even) not displayed (aired) in cinema. This is funny, because stripes in German (Streifen) is another word for film. However, it is, of course, also a word for describing the zebra (the stripes-pattern of the zebra). Hopefully some of you guys can come up with some English Material. Would love to see some nice ad's.

awww, all those posts really encourage me to start studying Spanish !! @mogra: by the way, I love your avatar..it's kind off-topic but it had to be said :=)

That's an interesting combination of languages! I am happy to see that quite a lot of people that actually registered on the forum can speak Chinese. Hopefully we can make the chinese forum busier and busier and learn more together about this fascinating language 认识你我很高兴！linguaholic 欢迎你 ：＝）

hey Christie. It's good having you here on linguaholic.com There are quite some German native speakers in the forum, me included :=) so if you got some questions, just hook me up. I might open a french subforum soon (I already had this but people did not seem to post in it hehe). Anyway, if you have some questions or inputs about the french language, you can always post them in the general language discussion thread. If we have a lot of french-related posts in there, we can move them to a new subforum! I do speak french as well. I am living in Biel, Switzerland. We do speak french and german here. It's pretty cool xD

thank you for sharing your thoughts about 讲 and 说。 I studied Chinese at Nanjing University 南京大学 and we actually learned both of them. I regularly overheard people saying 我给你讲。。。but also 就是说，你说。。 so it seemed that in Nanjing they use both of them in spoken Chinese. Also in the textbooks, I think I have seen both of them pretty regularly. I usually mix them a little bit so my Chinese does not sound so rudimental :=))

so you would suggest that I am doing a Teaching subforum for every language and name them like : English Teaching // French Teaching // German Teaching // etc?

In the subforum "German Exams" there is already an entry about the ZD (Zertifikat Deutsch), which is probably the most popular German language certificate for foreign learners of German. However, there are also some more specialized German tests, particularly for business. I would like to mention the ZDfB (Deutsch für den Beruf) and the BULATS, which are language certificates for "Business German". They both test a high level of language competence for business German. They are not suitable for everyone, but might be appropriate for people having the right background and training. You can find more information on the official homepage of the BULATS: http://www.bulats.org/de and regarding the ZDfB, you will find information here: http://www.goethe.de/lrn/prj/pba/bes/zdb/deindex.htm?wt_sc=zdfb Moreover you can do a demo test for the BULATS online, here: http://www.bulats.org/learning-resources/sample-tests