BWL

When I speak French, I tend to use the subjonctif with certain prepositions (but not all) like "avant"; so in French, "before I leave" is "avant que je parte". BUT "after I leave" is "après que je pars".

This is an incredible language. There are only two vowels but they change pronunciation depending on what consonant comes before them! It is amazing to listen to!

I found some incredible sound clips of Tevfik Esenç speaking Ubykh before his death.

http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/tools/show_text_en.php?id=crdo-UBY_CHEVRE_SOUND&id_ref=crdo-UBY_CHEVRE

My favorite is "The Other Side of Heaven" with Anne Hathaway and Christopher Gorham. It's a little-known film about a young Christian missionary who had been sent to Tonga. There he meets the local populace who are suspicious of outsiders and many of whom did not speak English. The missionary had to learn Tongan, with hilarious results.

His first sermon in Tongan was full of grammatical errors and he mixed-up the word for "boat" with the word for "toilet"!

http://studymorechinese.com/profiles/blogs/complex-strokes-character

The name of a noodle from Shaanxi province biang biang mian, might have one of the most complex hanzi in modern use. It takes 57 strokes to write and is not even found in the Kangxi dictionary no to mention most online dictionaries!

Next time you go to Shaanxi, do order a bowl of biang biang mian!

I think Turkish has a very smooth-flowing sound, very different from Greek and Arabic, its next door neighbours. I think Turkish music is far more elegant-sounding than even Persian, but that's jsut my personal opinion.

I personally think that Americans, like all nations have a wide spectrum of attitudes and cultural mores so it would be difficult to say that all Americans are linguistically arrogant. There are some Americans who live in Texas and California who are very fluent in Spanish and are interested to maintain their fluency. There are also many Americans who are not interested in learning foreign languages at all and would be flummoxed to find themselves in a foreign environment.

It's all subjective and really depends on the individual.

I find the Japanese usage of kanji and  their myriad pronunciations to be mind-bogglingly complex compared with the original Chinese hanzi from which they are descended. While a few Chinese characters can be read in two ways in Mandarin (行 can be pronounced xing or hang depending on context) Japanese takes this to a whole new level.

For example "hito" or "human being" is writtten 人. But "adult" is 大人, pronounced as "otona"! 五月雨 is "samidare" meaning the rain in early summer! And 土産 is "miyage" meaning "souvenir" (normally with the honorific prefix o-, hence "omiyage").

Does anyone have a list of commonly-used kanji with highly irregular kun-yomi pronunciations? For instance, 手 is pronounced "te" but 上手 is "joozu" and 下手 is pronounced "heta"!

Another clip in Canadian French. This one is a web animation called Têtes à claques - a face so irritating you want to slap it!

The accent is a very exaggerated version of a French Canadian accent done for humorous effect!

I guess it has to do with where most of the computer programmers are coming from nowadays! Students in many Asian countries like China, Korea and Japan learn American English and I'm sure computer software developed in those areas would be translated into American English versions first.

In the country where I was born, British English was and still is the standard and the basis of our vernacular speech. I grew up listening to English accents and regarding them as normal while an American accent would be very strange and sound like something out of a Hollywood movie.

In most parts of the UK which are non-rhotic, meaning they do not pronounce the "r" at the ends of syllables, so "pawn" and "porn" are pronounced in the exact same way.

There is a popular American reality TV series called "Pawnstars". The UK spin-off trailers had the cast say lines like "I'm a pawnstar" which when pronounced in a London accent, sounds just like "I'm a pornstar"!

That zujava article was very well-written and captures the essence of what it means to learn hiragana and katakana.

Getting a textbook would definitely be the best option and yes, it is a good idea to start with kana in order to get a basic idea of Japanese grammar and word order, before moving on to kanji.

I'm no Mandarin professor, but from what I understand from colloquial usage, 思考 is used to mean something like thinking over or pondering about something. It would be used for abstracts and non-tangible things like dreams.

观察 means observation and as least the way most of my friends use it, applies to physical things like to observe a specimen under a microscope. It is used for physical and tangible things while 思考 is used in a philosophical way.

I hope this helps!

Yes, the pronunciations and accent are pretty hard to master, but if you know Spanish and especially Italian, then the grammar would be relatively easy to learn and remember. It's just the phonetics and sounds of the language that make it difficult for a first-time learner.

Anyway, have fun! 

Yes, the word order and word choice has some English influences. They also use some words in an English manner for example, I once heard a Canadian friend say something like "Bienvenue" when another friend thanked her for something. I realised that she was saying "you're welcome"!

No French person would use "Bienvenue!" to mean "you're welcome" after somebody thanks them in place of "de rien"! This is definitely influenced by the English word "welcome".

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!!

Yes, this one is very interesting because I remember that even normal everyday expressions like "thank you" or 谢谢 have an ancient origin in feudal China. 文言 provides a lot of very common expressions with unique and interesting etymologies that reflect thousands of years of Chinese culture and literature.

Ah yes, Google Translate. I've stopped using it except to translate simple one- or two-word phrases like "market" or "post office" or "shopping mall".  That will probably give you a more accurate translation than "I want to kiss you!".

If acronyms are helpful to you, here's one that's used for remembering the difference between affect, the verb and effect, the noun: 

RAVEN  -- Remember: Affect = Verb, Effect =  Noun

That's an interesting mnemonic acronym! I'll use it to teach my nephews when they start learning how to spell the word in school. Pretty, cool!

There are millions of people in China learning English at this very moment (India had the benefit of being an ex-British colony, so the average urban Indian is much more fluent in English than the average urban Chinese). English will remain the dominant language, but it will have stiff competition from  Mandarin Chinese within the next 50 years or so.

Welcome Shelly!

I believe you'll find lots of Spanish speakers and learners here!  Please do make yourself at home and above all, have fun! 

I'm not actually familiar with the Quebecois accent. What's it like, BWL? Does it have much influence from English-speaking Canadian dialects/accents?

Here is a clip from "Tout le Monde en Parle", a popular Canadian celebrity talk show. Everybody on the show has really thick French Canadian accents.

One of the most interesting things is that even languages that are very far apart and are not grammatically related at all have very similar words for mother / father.

There are some linguists who believe that all languages descend from one common ancestor spoken thousands and thousands of years ago, most likely somewhere in Africa. Again this is just a theory but there quite a lot of people who believe in the existence of Nostratic, as this supposed world proto language is called.

I've heard about Rikaichan from friends who have just started learning Japanese. I heard that the translations are of much better quality than the mess you sometimes get from Google Translate (some would say "often"  :wacky:)!

I've never actually heard about this one but thanks for the information, I could use something like this when I'm in transit waiting for my plane or at the bus station trying to catch a bus! Sounds like a good app to encourage us to keep our thinking caps on!

The best way to learn a language is to engage as many parts of your brain as possible! Learn visually, by ear and use kinaesthetics or actions. Repeat new words and phrases that you have just learned over and over again but try to listen to clips of native speakers (or get a real-life native speaker to assist you) pronouncing them to get the feel of the accent, how your lips feel when you enunciate the words.

Livemocha.com is pretty good and I've been hearing my friends raving about it.

http://www.livemocha.com/learn-japanese

There are a whole lot of other languages besides Japanese.

Take a look around the site and try it out!