BWL

I definitely love being able to communicate without words for once , :wacky: on a forum! Written languages like Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese develop from pictographs too you know! (OK, well not like these smileys, but same idea!)

Definitely, I did the same while I was in France. I pretty much learned the basics of the French language before arriving in France and immersing myself totally in French culture so that I wouldn't be wandering about totally lost and clueless.

This link explains the oldest written languages known. As you can see, the oldest is Sumerian. But not that with languages like Chinese and Greek ,the ancient forms are very different from the modern languages and the oldest script used to write Greek, Linear B, is now extinct. So in many languages there is a break rather than a continuum in the written languages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_written_accounts Old Chinese writing for example looks more like hieroglyphics than modern Chinese. Vedic Sanskrit was attested from about 1500 BC, but it is now extinct and its descendant Classical Sanskrit is now used as a liturgical language by Hindus all over India but Classical Sanskrit also went extinct as a spoken language and evolved into the modern languages of Northern India and Sri Lanka today (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Sinhalese etc) Aramaic and Hebrew date to about the same time period. Aramaic is still spoken by various Christian and Jewish groups in the Middle East (all small communities and the language is in danger of extinction). The main group are the Assyrian Christians of Northern Iraq, Northwest Iran, Northeast Syria and Southeast Turkey.

They are an amazing way to learn a new language! And if you can download music videos, most music videos in China have subtitles (for Chinese speakers who are not so fluent in Mandarin but can read Chinese characters). You can thus pick up new words and phrases to increase your vocabulary.

This one uses the metaphor of there being plenty of fishes in the sea (good and bad ones) but what it means it that for one who has lost a chance at finding love, there is no need to worry because the world is a big place with lots of potential partners out there.

My favourite is "Bob's your uncle". It's a very British expression meaning everything is OK. For example I give a long list of instructions too someone on how to bake a cake and then at the end I tell them, "Just follow the instructions carefully, and Bob's your uncle", meaning if you follow the instructions as explained everything will turn out alright.

I'm afraid I do not know of any sites like this (there must be some!). I have many Dutch friends how speak English very well and the thing that I notice most is that speaking Dutch or Flemish as a first language can be both a blessing and a curse for the English language learner. What I mean is that Dutch and Flemish are similar enough to English such that learning it is not so difficult , yet the problem is that they often forget or confuse words that are very different from Dutch and Flemish but are in use in English. For example, my friend Jos was asking for a key when he totally forgot how to say it in English, and said something like "Where's my slottle?"! He thought that "slottle" would sound like a plausible English word ! It does make sense, we say to "slot" in the key and a keyhole is a slot where you put in the key. It was what we call a calque or linguistic copy of the word "sleutel".

In Malay and Indonesian the word for "thank you" is "terima kasih" which literally means "accept love". This is a way for expressing gratitude because the word "kasih" means "love" but in a non-romantic way so a better translation would be "accept my gratitude / affection". The reply is "sama-sama" meaning "it's the same" (to you).

Absolutely, think of it as an ever-expanding database for the legacy of ancient peoples that are being swallowed up by the modern world. I used to study the grammatical structures of some of them (as part of a linguistics course I did at university) and the grammar can be much more exotic than any Asian or European language. If these languages go extinct, we as humans will be losing a vital part of our shared heritage.

I'm on the fence with this. It depends on what your goals are. If you want to start with the basics of a learning a language, for example you want to go on holiday and just want to learn how to order food at a restaurant and ask how much an item is, then by all means, use the Pimsleur method. However if you are learning a new language and for whatever reason, intend to go deeper and learn more about its grammatical structure, then the Pimsleur method would fall short.

I would like to bring your attention to a cause that is very close to my heart; language extinction. All over the world, minority groups are losing their languages and switching to English, Spanish, French or some other major world language to the detriment and loss of their native heritage and culture. This website was founded by a group of Canadian intellectuals in a very valiant attempt to help preserve the languages of the Aboriginal First Nations of Canada (those whom the world very, very wrongly calls "Red Indians and Eskimos"). Feel free to browse through the site, it is very interesting and you can hear the amazing sounds of the native languages, some of which are spoken by only a handful of tribal elders. I really hope their amazing ancient languages will survive for the coming generations. http://www.firstvoices.com/

This one is slightly more sophisticated. It's a pun on the word "Far West" which sounds like the word "Phare Ouest", the name of a company. Together with this is the image of Breizh Cola , where Breizh is the local native Breton name for Britanny, the far West of France. The far west was also where Cola was invented. This one is interesting on all sorts of levels.

What most learners know about Japanese is that there are several speech levels ranging from high and refined to low and familiar. The sentences that end in "-masu" and "desu" that beginners learn are a neutral polite form that would be the most useful for foreigners without sounding overtly informal or on the other, too polite and stilted. What most beginners do not know is that in informal or casual Japanese, there are differences in the language as spoken by men and women. The link below is for a very good website that explains the distinguishing features of masculine versus feminine speech (formal speech tends to be identical in among men and women; it's just the informal varieties that are different) http://www.epochrypha.com/japanese/materials/genderspecific/

I remembered hearing an English friend use the word "gobsmacked" once. It sounded really weird, like a name for a character from a Harry Potter novel!. Sir Gregory Gobsmacked at your service!

Japanese is definitely much more complex than Chinese it its grammar especially when it comes to honorific language. There are several levels, if I can remember and the choice of which one to use is affected by things like the age and social position of the person that one is talking with. There are also types of keigo used to "elevate" the person being spoken to and to "lower" the speaker. Yes, it's all very complex and I am sure that Korean has a system similar to this as well. I agree, the Korean alphabet is a precise scientific and phonetic marvel compared to the mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana that the Japanese use. You could learn to read (but not necessarily understand what you are reading, of course) Korean hangul in one or two days, but take years to do the same in Japanese.

Welcome Ellen! I hope you enjoy yourself here! I am sure you will find yourself at home here, feel free to share your interests, experiences and even tips regarding language learning and teaching. Have fun! Brian

An interesting personal challenge, if you're up for it! Benny the Irish Polyglot shares his technique to learn 2,000 kanji in 2 months! He says it is possible and I do not doubt him but take a look for your selves! http://www.fluentin3months.com/2k-kanji/ By 2,000 kanji, he is in fact referring to the 常用漢字 (Jouyou Kanji).

I learned to write Tolkien's Tengwar in my teens, so that I can write stuff in my diary that my nosy brother and sister wouldn't understand if they were to rummage through my drawers! I just wrote in English or Malay but substituted the Roman letters with their approximate Tengwar equivalents.

It is never too late to learn! If you have the interests and the need to (you're moving to a new country perhaps etc.) then it will become easier. Do not see learning a new language as something difficult, think of it as being like riding a bicycle ; the more you practice, the better you get at it, but your going to fall down the first few lessons. Just pick yourself up and go with the flow, you'll be speeding down linguistic highways in no time!

I found this list of all the particles (including some rarely-used ones) in the Japanese language. It includes grammatical particles like "wa', "wo", "ni", "de", "no" etc. in addition to sentence-final particles like "yo', "zo" and "ze". You can even click on some of the common particles like は (wa) for links to pages that give sample sentences with the correct usage (not all of the particles have links yet, though). http://nihongoichiban.com/home/japanese-grammar-particles/

I'm sure most of you know that much of Spain (and Portugal) was under Arab rule for several hundred years. The impact of Arabic on the language is not minor and some of the differences between Spanish and Portuguese on the one hand and French and Italian on the other are due to the Arabic influence on Spanish and Portuguese. For example the world-famous ¡Olé! was probably derived from Arabic "wallah" or "by Allah". And "ojalá" may either have been derived from "inshallah" or "law sha' Allah" both meaning "God willing" or "By the will of God". Common words like "aceite", "aceituna", "alcalde" (notice the al- prefix), "adobe", "aduana", "alarife" and thousands more are actually Arabic borrowings! Even the Arabic definite article "al-" was borrowed with the word and adapted to Spanish pronunciation.

The first "voy a" doesn't really mean "go" it simply functions as an auxiliary verb to indicate the near future tense. It's like saying "I'm going to kill you!" to a guy standing right in front of you, with a gun in your hand. "I'm going to" would normally indicate moving to a new location (I'm going to school - with actual walking and movement) but since you are standing right in front of the guy with a gun in your hand, why would you need to say "I'm going to kill you"? You're not moving at all! The reason is the "I'm going to" part is used as a helping verb to change the meaning of the main verb "to kill". It shows that the action will occur and that it will occur very shortly. This is the function of "voy a" in Spanish as well. It shows that an action will occur within a short amount of time (what is known as the near future). "Voy a comer" simply means "I will eat (very shortly) or in colloquial English "I am going to eat". Meaning that the food is ready and you can eat it right away without any actual motion to a new location. "Voy a ir a comer" means "I am going to go to eat" meaning that you will (very shortly) move to a new destination to eat, with actual movement involved.

There was an Italian restaurant in Shanghai called Va Bene, meaning "OK" in English. It wasn't very popular because when pronounced properly in Italian, the name sounds exactly like "Not Cheap" in Shanghainese dialect! "Va be ne" (I wrote it more or less phonetically) is the Shanghainese equivalent of the Mandarin "bù piányi" (不便宜)! No wonder the customers never came in large numbers!

I totally agree with most of you, I would never use Google Translate to translate complex sentences from English to Japanese, for example. To test this out this is the exact sentence that I had typed using my laptop into the Google translate web page. It was for English to Japanese and this monstrosity was what I got: English: I would like to help you. Japanese: 私はあなたを助けるためにしたいと思います。 This is the first and last time I use Google Translate for English to Japanese!

Yes! I've only ever seen it used nowadays on some old signboards on shops (or those that sell antiques, for example - to give the place an old-fashioned feel). Trying to read an old text written entirely like this gave me a headache! But yes, do people still learn how to write it nowadays? Or is it only learned by professional artists / art historians / calligraphers?