linguaholic

hey 3DWaffle1 You are most welcome here on linguaholic.com !!! It is great to see new users joining almost every day! May I ask you where you are from and which languages you are learning?

Hey dcprecy, welcome to linguaholic.com! :angel: If you need any help in studying Mandarin Chinese, let me know. I studied it for many years and I will be glad to help you out :grin:

try this resource here. I am not sure if this list is complete; still it is pretty useful as you will find the most common measure words there. http://www.languagerealm.com/chinese/chinese_measure_words.php

cool, Xenon! Thank you for providing those German Apps. I had a look yesterday for useful German Apps and I must say, I was a little bit disappointed. In comparison with other languages, there are really not so many cool apps for studying german. still, at this point, I would like to mention again the app DUOLINGO. It is available for many different languages, but this app does look really professional and it is quite useful. it is free as well. give it a try.

Some time ago I was posting my favorite Chinese Study Apps here in the forum. At this time, I remembered a nice little app that I installed some time ago...however, I could not come up with the name of it...now I can...the app is called StickyStudy. You can get Sticky Study for Chinese Mandarin (hanzi), Japanese Kanji and also Japanese Kana (Hiragana and Katakana). What is StickyStudy (Mandarin Chinese version)? Simply put, StickyStudy is a solid flashcard vocabulary tool. Have a look at the picture above so you can see how your screen is gonna look like when loading this fabulous app What is Sticky Study all about? It is very simple, yet effective. You will get all Chinese Characters for all levels of the New HSK Exam and you also get all the vocabulary for all the six different HSK levels. You can easily load those predefined decks and start studying. It is a spaced repetition program and provides some nice graphics. you can also switch from simplified characters to traditional characters and you get audio pronunciation for all the characters and words in a very good quality. One cool feature is also that you can store, backup and transfer all the data (decks) with dropbox !!!

For me the most effective way to learn ANY language is to actually live in the country where this language is spoken. I know that this somehow sounds trivial but it is not. If you really want to master a language, go and life there for some time. You may have a family and two kids and you can obviously not just leave home and life in a different country..but if you are single and have some time and some courage, DO IT. People spend thousands of dollars for language courses and stuff and try to learn difficult languages in their own country. Better invest that time and money in a trip abroad. I have some friends that can speak about 5-8 languages. How did they do it? Well, they were simply living in different countries. A year will do for most of the languages (at least you will be able to speak the language pretty fluently). It is also good to have a boyfriend / girlfriend that speaks one of your target languages. This is, of course, not always possible, but if it does happen, it will definitely boost your skills in that language !

Language Certificates: German // Zertifikat Deutsch (ZD) There are a few useful language certificates for the german language. Let's start with the ZD (Zertifikat Deutsch). This certificate has proven its validity over years and is recognized as proof in many different situations. The (ZD) is the result of a collaboration between the world famous Goethe Institute, the Österreichischem Sprachdiplom (ÖSD), the WBT (Weiterbildungs-Testsysteme gGmbH) and the Schweizer Erziehungsdirektorenkonferenz (EDK) from Switzerland. The Zertifikat Deutsch exam is for adult learners of German, no matter whether they are inside or outside of a German-speaking country. What's more, there is also the (ZD j) and this is the "version" for adolescent learners of German. If you are looking for sample tests / exercises for the "Zertifikat Deutsch", you will find them on the official homepage of the Goethe Institute. I would like to share the direct link with you guys here: https://www.goethe.de/lrn/prj/pba/bes/gzd/mat/enindex.htm

In the second sentence, I actually stopped a certain activity in order to smoke a cigarette? Is that what you mean tommy ?

What do you mean exactly by saying ...in order to light a cigarette and smoke it? I think it is the contrary also in the second sentence it means "the action" to stop smoking a cigarette.

I would say that the first sentence means that you quit smoking (forevever) as a habit and the second one means just in a particular situation. I am not a native speaker, so if I am wrong, blame me

good afternoon irina yes, if there is a verb after instead of, you will have to use a gerund. sample sentence: I would rather use a baseball bat to kick your ass instead of using a pistol :wacky: I try to give a funny example so you are more likely to remember it, hehe If you use instead without of, it is an adverb. As a preposition, instead is never used alone. So, in this case, you will always need to use instead of.

Guten Tag Manuel This is maybe really a problem for Germans or let's say German Speaking people, as I am from Switzerland :=)) I do have problems with this as well, however I improved a lot. Still, I am not a native speaker so I checked one of my numerous english books and it is stating the following: (The book, by the way, is Recycling Advanced English by Clare West). Usage of Make and Do: Make usually conveys the idea of creating or producing something new: examples for the usage of make: make a speech, make a fuss, make a noise, make the beds, make a (new) thing, make (someone) ill / well / better, make a mistake and make a change. Do is used with work, obligations or general activities: do homework, do housework, do military service, do your duty, do a favour, do (someone) good, do with / without

you are SUCH a good guy dtommy79

hehe funny stuff guys. lickety-split is funny as hell, did not know about that yet hehe.

same here Kristi. All the languages that I study or studied :emo:, I always embed the word into a sentence and this let's me memorize the vocabulary much better. It does take some time but trust me, it is well worth it.

are you interested in learning how to write as well or are you just interested in speaking? If you would like to learn how to write I would suggest you having a look at the books "remembering the kanji" from James w. Heisig. It is very effective and "gamifies" studying Japanese Characters. It is also available for Chinese characters -->"remembering the hanzi". you can find more information about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Remembering_the_Hanzi I have both, remembering the hanzi and remembering the kanji and they are both great.

really interesting posts Fabrice and Ersatz. If you interested in idioms and metaphors, I suggest you to read the book called "Metaphors we live by" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. This book is like the holy grail when it comes to metaphors. When I did a thesis about metaphors at university, I ran into this great book. You will find lots of examples in there and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are really making an effort to show everyone that metaphors are a fundamental mechanism of our minds and that metaphors shope our perception (without us even noticing).

oh I got that now...but why fish are used metaphorically to describe this...I also don't know to be honest :=)

that's a cool thread with some really funny videos. A year ago my friend send me a rather special video for studying Chinese. It is good fun though..check it out :=))

yes, I had to do this as well in linguistics. This is also very crucial in computational linguistics...as the computer programs need to parse every sentence..so of course all the "blocks" need to be split in specific classes like nouns, verbs, noun phrases, verb phrases and so on. Of course there are always different possibilities how to parse a sentence / text. However, in computational linguistics you often already have predefined tag sets that you can use to parse texts. In Europe we use a lot the STTS ( Stuttgart-Tübinger-Tagset).

yes, it is the same for European Learners of Chinese. There are also some "sounds" that we are not used to, so this makes it pretty difficult to study the language. I know some people they have been studying Chinese for many years but on the streets they are still not understood as their pronunciation is just not good enough...the funny thing is, their teachers probably have no problem to understand them as they are used to foreign speakers..but on the streets..it's a whole different thing

For all the learners of German, I recommend you to check out the mind snack app. It is a really cool app that offers great graphics and really gamifies studying! they do not only support German. You can also have it for different languages like Chinese, French, Spanish and so on. Definitely worth checking out. the link is: http://www.mindsnacks.com/

hey there that is a good idea but there are already so many forums that I think for the moment it is better to leave the forums as they are and all the questions about languages that do no have an own forum (yet) can be placed in the general discussion thread. if there will be a lot of questions/answers about portuguese, I will be very happy to create an own subforum for it. :angel:

Welcome Giving!! It is an ambitious goal but of course it is possible. I think you can learn fast as you are still very young. Just go for it :=) we will try to assist you as good as we can :karate: