BWL

Too bad, because he really was everywhere last year Gangnam Style was really popular in Poland, too. Our TV even had a famous Polish singer dance the Gangnam Style dance on the New Year's Eve for  some reason. 

I actually quite like this song :angel:

See what I mean!  the Koreans are conquering the world in a way that no one could possibly imagine! Yes, it's pleasant to listen to the first dozen times but in Asia, this song was ruling the airwaves for the past year and a half, so you can imagine how bored my ears are!  :frozen:

To make things a little more competitive (or to give encouragement to those who are intent on learning even more exotic languages!) I am currently looking some youtube clips of another polyglot who's either American or Canadian and who can speak over a dozen languages fluently ! And not just the typical Spanish, German and French but also Burmese, Korean, Tagalog and Hindi! I'll tryto look his clips up on Youtube!

The Chinese have been feeling uneasy with their neighbours the Koreans and the Japanese for centuries! And now that Korean pop-culture is being exported, the tensions and rivalries will be flaring up!

I was at a party in Bordeaux last year and coincidentally someone decided to play some hot new video clips from Youtube. The first one was, you guessed it....PSY's Gangnam Style! I told my French friends that one of the reasons I left Asia was so that I could avoid watching and listening to him over and over again!

I love omniglot.com ! It's one of my favorite websites and it was also where I first learnt about the amazing Cree / Blackfoot / Inuktitut Syllabary! Check it out if you want to know what a truly exotic writing system looks like!

I think that although Esperanto is extremely regular and logical, it is also very Euro-centric and uses word roots derived from European languages especially Romance and Slavic. For example "patro" for "father" would be immediately recognizable to anyone who speaks a Romance language or any other European language like English that borrow extensively from Latin and Latin-based languages. It leaves speakers of languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean at a disadvantage.

As such, learning Esperanto might be more of a quaint curiosity or interesting hobby but I doubt it will ever become a world language.

I remember talking to an old linguist friend who was studying wenyan 文言 or Classical Chinese at the time. He was French but had a good grasp of both modern Mandarin and wenyan.

I was wondering if anyone has a list of common wenyan expressions still in daily use in modern Mandarin? Some common one that I can think of (and which I use all the time in speech) are 天下 (meaning "on earth", literally "below heaven") and 马上 (meaning 'immediately" or "rightly away") - this phrase is almost primeval, it comes from the ancient expression "on a horse" almost as if by meaning "do it immediately!" the ancients would say "Get on your horse right now!".

Note: I used modern simplified Chinese characters above (which obviously wouldn't be this way in the ancient texts).

I found this blog for learning Korean:

http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/category/blog/

It does seem to have a hip pop-culture feel to it, since so much of Korean culture is being exported overseas thanks to glittery K-pop. I must have heard PSY's "Gangnam Style" at least 10 times while I was in France, on TV on the radio and heaven knows where else!

I was shopping the other day at a 7-11 in Malaysia and was asking the guy at the counter for some mosquito coils. I was stumped because I totally forgot the Malay word for "mosquito coil"! That's the traditional incense-like repellent that we burn in Southeast Asia in the evenings to wad off mosquitoes.

I could only remember "katori senko" the Japanese word! Not that the Malay-speaking checkout counter guy would  understand what in the world I meant!. Finally after about five minutes of trying to explain what I meant I finally remembered the word!

http://www.fluentin3months.com/

One of my favorite blogs, written by an Irishman named Benny has him sharing his personal techniques on how to learn a language in 3 months. Granted, he is extremely talented and gifted so his methods may not serve everybody! I like his posts anyway, they are highly entertaining and clearly show his love of language and travel.

He also insists that learning Chinese is not as hard as people think it is: http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/

hey deen

sure, I can help you out here. This instrument is called er 二胡。why 二胡? That's pretty simple.

The instrument has two strings, therefore it is called 二 for "two" and 胡 means string here.

The erhu and pipa are my favorite classical Chinese musical instruments! I think more people should learn to play them in Europe and the US!

I definitely agree with the part about speaking whole sentences  , even Chinese people from Henan or Shaanxi who visit Beijing and who speak Mandarin with heavy accents are understood if they speak using whole sentences and not single words!

Yes, it really depends on the institution. Sometimes all it takes is to be a foreigner! Chinese people assume all foreigners are English-speaking Americans so even Europeans whose first language is not English may find it relatively easy to get a stint there.

If you do get an attachment or temporary position, it could be an amazing experience!

The different dialects and accents of German can make learning it (while traveling across the German-speaking regions) to be a real challenge. I think the hardest accent for me has to be Swiss German. I had some friends from Zurich who would speak in their dialect and all I can understand would be "Nee" or No"! They also roll their "Rs" like the Italians and use a lot of guttural "kch" sounds.

I do remember "verschlafenes Nest" used to refer to a sleepy town or quiet area. A person who is in a good mood could be told that, "Sie sieht's durch ihre rosarote Brille!", or "she's looking at it through her pink spectacles!". 

Also, something that is no longer relevant is referred to as the "Schnee von gestern", or the "snow from yesterday".

Greetings!

Do make yourself at home! I think you will find this quite and interesting place to learn languages and to share your own language-learning experiences!

Cheers,

Brian

Spanish is even more widely spoken than you think. I was on holiday in Istanbul and I hears some old folk speaking (they were clearly locals, living in one of the neighborhoods there) in what I thought was Spanish. I asked them (in Spanish) if they were from Spain. Imagine my shock when they told me that they were in fact Turkish Jews and that their ancestors had been living in Turkey for centuries! I was walking in an old Jewish neighborhood and some of the old folk (but not all) still spoke Judeo-Spanish.

The Turkish Jews are descended from Spanish Jews who fled Spain during the 15th century and slightly after during the Spanish Inquisition when Muslims and Jews were either forced to convert to Catholicism or if they were still faithful to their old religions, to face death by torture. Many Jews (and Muslims) either converted or fled. They were allowed to settle in the Islamic world, in North Africa and in the Ottoman Empire, what is now Turkey.

I find it really ironic that when the Christians were discriminating against Jews centuries ago, it was the Muslims who gave them refuge. I wonder what modern Israelis and Palestinians would say if they met some Turkish (and North African Sephardic Jews) who told them history!

I know, I learnt them by making up stories to remember as well. There are some good books on the market for learning hanzi or kanji by this method. For example, in the book I read, the Chinese word for "every", 每 was made up of "man" 人 standing on top of "mother" 母. Imagine the "man" standing on top of "mother" and then the "mother" squishes him upwards so that his left leg extends in a straight horizontal line. What this means is, "every man has a mother to support him and mould him". Hence, 每 for "every" or "mei".

I've never done it myself but have heard pretty good reviews about it. The course seems to be structured into 3 levels, but the contents are actually quite simplistic, you may have difficulty passing JLPT level N5 if you complete even all three levels.

There is a lot of dialogue but according to a friend who bought the course, it is all spoken and pronounced extremely slowly, meaning that you can learn a lot of vocabulary but will have problems getting used to ordinary Japanese spoken at normal speeds in everyday situations.

There are two languages that I know of that can be easily parsed into a syntactic tree; Japanese and Tagalog.

Japanese syntax is structured around the verb which occupies the last slot in a sentence (not counting the sentence final particles like "yo", "zo", "ze", "ka", :kana", etc. A typical sentence looks like this (I removed the honorifics and sentence particles to simplify things a bit)

Otoko ga kodomo ni hon o ageta. "The man gave a book to the child".

Otoko    ga        kodomo                ni                    hon              o                              ageta

(MAN)  (actor)  (CHILD)    (receiver or goal)      (BOOK)  (object of action)              (GAVE)

The little words or particles (ga, ni, o) that occur after nouns in a Japanese sentence are the syntactic markers, they are the strings that connect the nouns to the head or top of the syntactic tree, which happens to be the verb "ageta" (GAVE).

Tagalog has a similar structure but in reverse, with the verb occurring at the head in front and particles before the nouns!:

Binigay ng lalaki ang libro sa bata. (The man gave the book to a boy)

Binigay          ng            lalaki            ang              libro                sa                    bata

(GAVE)            (actor)        (MAN)        (object)        (BOOK)            (goal)                (CHILD)

Tagalog is much more complex because the verbs, particles and sentence structure change depending on the focus, whether the actor or the object or the goal is definite or indefinite (having either "the" or "a")

Binigay ng lalaki ang libro sa bata (The man gave the book to a boy)

Bumigay ng libro ang lalaki sa bata (The man gave a book to a boy)

Binigyan ng libro ng lalaki ang bata (A man gave a book to the boy)

Tagalog and other Philippine languages are very complex, very different from Chinese or European languages that most people here are familiar with. But yes, they do fit into a syntactic tree structure.

No one really knows what the first human language was like, it either went extinct or had evolved into the present day languages on Earth. The oldest language with written materials (cuneiform tablets, etc) that archaeologists have found so far is Sumerian.

The problem with some of these fictional languages that are meant to be spoken by aliens is that they are not "exotic" enough! For example, they all have "a,e,i,o,u" because those are some of the most common sounds that can be made by human vocal cords.

I like Na'vi because it is meant to be alien. The consonant clusters are very interesting, for example, "metal" is "fngap". It uses, ejectives, almost "popping" sounds made by pronouncing a voiceless consonant together with a glottal stop. The grammar is exotic as well, using free word order (I love you, love I you, you love I, love you I etc.) where the sentence can be scrambled in any way.\

Some real-life Earth languages can be just as exotic. My old neighbor in Bordeaux, was an immigrant from Morocco. His family was of Berber descent and spoke a dialect known as Shilha or Tashelhit. "You gave it!" is (believe it or not), "tfktstt"! Listening to him tell a story in Shilha was better than listening to two hours of Na'vi on Avatar!

The thing is that most asian languages rely heavily on acccent and pronounciation, this is why they are so difficult and vast.

It depends, Japanese has a simple consonant and vowel system but it does have a pitch accent, where the position of the accent will make a difference on the meanings of words. Chinese has tones, depending on the dialect, between 4 and 10 tones per syllable, which can drastically change the meanings of words. Thai and Vietnamese also have tones, while Korean, Indonesian and Filipino do not have tones at all.

I am very glad to hear that there are organisations out there to raise the awareness that some native languages are becoming endangered. I would like to take an example of my country- our native language  here is creole, which is not well-known in the world. People were more encouraged to learn french instead until recently the government took the decision to integrate creole in the educational system- we are encouraged to read/write/sing in creole thus preserving our native language.

Lots of countries speak English and French, but only there is only one that uses Morisyen! It is a worthy cause and interesting as well. The more a country's government preserves it's people's native languages the more I feel that the citizens appreciate their government for caring about the things that matter.

Well the difficulty of learning a language is relative. I imagine for a native English or French speaker, Chinese would be fiendishly difficult!

I strongly believe that slang is the main catalyst in language change. If you have a slang word or phrase that becomes so commonly used that in a generation or two it becomes an accepted part of the language, then what you have is a language change in progress.

For example, the Latin word for "head" was "caput" (the source of the English words "capital, captain. capitalism etc.). Yest about two thousand years ago, Roman soldiers begun using the word "testa" or "pot" as a slang word for "head"! What happened next was that the slang word became so much more common than the original Classical Latin word that it replaced it entirely in some(but not all) of the daughter languages that evolved form Latin. So in Italian, "head" is now "testa" and in French, "tête". The Spanish retain "cabeza", ultimately derived from "caput". The Latin slang word became the formal word in Italian and French but not in Spanish.