lingolino

I heard about Mitsubishi trying to promote their 4x4 car under the name Pajero in Spain.

In Spanish pajero means spanker!

It is in the top 10 of the most unfortunate car names worldwide.

Check them out by following this link:

http://www.oddee.com/item_93544.aspx

On a word level Google translate is pretty decent. On a sentence level? Forget about it....

It can be a help to get words from a sentence translated into another language but don't expect Google translate to get the grammar right.

It is just too hard for statistical machine translation to grasp the context as well as the grammar of a certain text. There are just too many options...

My favorite quotes are from Oscar Wilde:

True friends stab you in the front.

Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Oscar Wilde

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde

Hi betita03

Japanese consists of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

Hiragana is the basic Japanese script schoolchildren learn whereas Kanji are the characters loaned from Chinese.

Katakana is used to write foreign words such as McDonalds, coffee etc.

If you want to understand written Japanese you have to know all these three alphabets. Hiragana is by far the easiest and can be learned in a couple of hours. Kanji on the other hand consists of thousands of characters and may take you years to write/read/memorize.

I hope I could help you with my answer.

Greetz

Lingolino

I don't really believe in the Pimsleur method. There are several flaws that let me question the method as a whole:

- Simple repetition of words and sentences doesn't help you to memorize and save it in the long time memory, at least not for me

- Without any knowledge of grammar I doubt that you will become fluent in a foreign language

- I prefer written documents/books for language learning

- Last but not least there are a lot of free materials on the web. Why would I pay for it?