BWL

I wonder if there is a way to remember those typically German separable verb and inseparable verb combinations? I remember that ubersetzen means "to translate" but also "to cross over" (?) whether one decides to separate the preposition "uber" from the main verb. Does anyone here have a good system to remember the common ones and how to differentiate them? Thanks!

This is a good site as well but may be more suited for the advanced learner. There are a lot of sample sentences showing the various tenses and grammatical endings. However the vocabulary might be a little advanced for the beginner. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/s_jgrammar.html

It definitely has to do with typing on keypads. I make mistakes myself when typing quickly and don't have the time to stop to check what I happen to be typing at the time. I once typed "Good Night" in a message sent to a friend and carelessly misspelled the last two letters in "Night". The spell check automatically selected "Niger" in place of "Night"! I had sent her "Good Niger", instead of the intended "Good Night!". I also notice this is French messages as well. It seems French people are becoming increasingly lazy and "misspell" (whether intentionally or not) the various forms of the French "passé composé" and even merge it with the "imparfait" so you have "je parlé" rather than "je parlais". It probably takes fewer keystrokes to type "parlé" than "parlais". Laziness (or the need to type long messages in a relatively short time) does play a part in this case.

Correct answer is: 'When did you receive it?' Explanation: One way to remember is to use the same sentence but just substitute the verb with another, like "to do". Example: f I were to say, "Did you did it?". This sounds very weird, right? The two "dids" just don't go together. Use this as a memory aid, to help you remember. Since "Did you did it?" sounds weird so the only one that sounds right is "Did you do it?". Remember this construction "Did you do it?"! Now, you know that "do" is in the present tense. So always use the present tense in "Did you _____ it?". 'Did you do it?". "Did you eat it?", "Did you drink it" , "Did you buy it?", "Did you receive it?". So the answer is ' I did receive ' or ' you did receive ' I hope this helps!

Here is a good link to a site (NHK) for learning Japanese (spoken and written). www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/ You can even download radio lessons to hear the actual lessons being spoken by native speakers. Some things that I can recommend; learn Japanese by familiarizing yourself with the sounds. Try to visualize the nouns and verbs when you hear them being spoken. The more you try to visualize them ,the better you will remember them.

This is an interesting issue. As a native Southern Chinese speaker (my native fangyan or dialect is Minnan, a dialect of Southern Fujian province which is also spoken in Taiwan and numerous migrant communities all over South-east Asia), I always used 讲 or "jiang" meaning "to speak" or "to say" even when I speak standard Mandarin. In my native dialect it is pronounced "kong" (I haven't indicated the tones) and is the only word meaning "to speak" or "to say". As foreign language learners, which word; "jiang" (讲) or "shuo" (说), were you taught to use? Did you learn to say ,"我讲话" or "我说话"? I noticed than in Southern China, most dialects (there are some notable exceptions) use 讲. This seems to extend right up to the Shanghai, Suzhou and Ningbo areas. This carries over to the Mandarin that Southern Chinese people speak, using 讲 almost entirely except for a few set phrases like 我听说... or "I heard that...".

To understand what hiragana is you first need to know the etymology. The kanji or Chinese characters for "hiragana" are 平仮名. 平 or "hira" means "flat", "even" or "smooth". 仮名 or "gana" is actually derived from "kana" due to a process of phonological change called "rendaku" (too complex to describe here but I'll be happy to make more posts about it at some other area in the subforum". Back to "kana" - it is derived from 仮 or "kari" meaning "borrowing" and 名 or "na" meaning "name" (it's the same character in "O-namae wa?" or "What's your name?"). Hence the meaning of hiragana is "a flat, even or smooth borrowed name". Here "name" refers to Chinese characters. Therefore they originally referred to Chinese characters that were borrowed and then modified to represent Japanese sounds. The "hira" part refers to the smooth or even strokes used to write hiragana as opposed to the blocky, angular, style of katakana. Hiragana derived from Chinese characters simplified in a smooth, calligraphic style, so they sometimes were referred to as "women's writing" for there delicate feminine appearance. Another reason they were sometimes called "women's writing" is because in ancient times they were commonly used by women (Lady Murasaki wrote her iconic "Tale of Genji" almost entirely in hiragana, except for a few Chinese loanwords written in kanji - this is the precursor of its current usage in modern Japanese) since the study of kanji or Chinese characters, a thousand years ago was considered only suitable for men.

I absolutely agree. Think of it as a corner for linguistic exchanges. We could teach each other our native languages (or languages that we are fluent in). It is always more fun to learn languages in an interactive manner than reading from a boring textbook. When I taught Malay to foreigners living and working in Malaysia, I noticed that they learnt quickly when they had questions of their own, when they took the effort to ask why this word is used or why this phrase is different from their own language, etc. It helps in the cognitive learning process.

Yes, the Japanese are really innovative when it comes to adapting loanwords to fit their own native phonological structure. They turned "sexual harassment" into "sekuhara", written セクハラ in katakana. You often do not realize that the word is of foreign origin. Then there's my favorite; "mazakon" or マザコン meaning either "Oedipus complex" or else a "Mama's boy". This comes from the English "mother complex". Finally there's ロリコン or "rorikon" meaning "Lolita complex". The Japanese are amazingly adept at manipulating the phonology of loanwords and there are thousands of them from English, French, German, Italian and other European languages (but mostly English nowadays) and not to mention many ancient ones from Chinese. I'll think of some more as we go along.

Toishan is one of my favorite dialects because it is so close to Cantonese in grammar and word choice yet the phonology is quite bizarre. They replace a lot of the common consonants in Cantonese with other sounds. They drop the "s" and change it to what linguists call a lateral fricative (it's very common sound in Welsh, where it's written "ll" as in Llanelli. Get a Welshman to pronounce "Llanelli" for you to hear what the "ll" sounds like). They drop all the voiceless dental D sounds so "big" ("daai" in Cantonese or "da" in Mandarin) becomes "aai". The aspirated T sound becomes a H. So "Toishan" in Cantonese is pronounced Hoillaan in the local Toishanese accent.

The Japanese have been borrowing vocabulary from other languages for thousands of years. They have been doing this with Chinese for a very, very long time; adapting Chinese words to Japanese pronunciation and grammar. Now it's the English language's turn. There are some rather interesting loanwords from other languages besides English. I remember a common slang word for "couple" that was written in katakana; "abekku" from the French word "avec". The Japanese turned a simple French preposition "avec" or "with" into a full-fledged Japanese word!

HI! I come from Malaysia, where we learn up to three languages in school from a young age. I could speak English, Malay and two dialects of Chinese by the time I was nine years' old and this is normal in Malaysia. I really enjoyed learning languages and am always testing my boundaries. I have just been offered a job in France (yes, the interview was in French) so I can say that yes, I can function in that language too. There are many countries in the world where multilingualism is the rule rather than the exception.

I guess the shapes of katakana tend to be more similar to each other (and thus easier to confuse learners) than hiragana. The boxy, angular look is also very jarring in aesthetics compared to the smoother lines of hiragana. I like to think that this is the reason why katakana is used in to write foreign names and words as well as onomatopoeic sound effects, the jarring, angular visuals are meant to stand out on a page of kanji and hiragana.

Definitely go for Mandarin. It's the official language in China and Taiwan. Chinese dialects are very different, and speaking only Cantonese would be very limiting. There are also some people from the older generation as well as some younger people who are of Chinese descent who have never learned Mandarin but who may speak some of their ancestral dialect which they learned at home from their parents or grandparents. I'll tell you the Chinese dialects that I have heard so far on my travels: London has a large number of Cantonese speakers mostly from Hong Kong. Paris has large numbers of Wenzhou and Chaozhou dialect speakers (both of these dialects are as different from each other and from Mandarin as Portuguese, French and Romanian ). New York has large numbers of Fuzhou speakers (this is one of the toughest dialects for Cantonese and Mandarin speakers to understand). LA used to have many speakers who spoke Toishan dialect (a variant of Cantonese) although they are being replaced by Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong. I even encountered an enclave of Beijing Mandarin speakers in Northeast Italy! So to put it simply, I suggest some Mandarin would be useful.

Learning Japanese is a little bit more complicated than learning Spanish. For one thing, the writing system is probably one of the most complex on Earth, combining Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana and even Roman letters in a complicated system with many words that can be pronounced in different ways whether they stand alone or in a phrase. Speaking is another problem as a fluent speaker must be able to control the complex honorific system, where different words, expressions and even verb conjugations are used depending on whom you are speaking too as well as whom you are speaking about! Informal Japanese even has different forms used by men and women. I knew an American girl who learned the language from her Japanese boyfriend, and let me tell you, her informal Japanese was so masculine, some people thought she was a butch lesbian!

HI! Japanese uses a complex and intricate system of sound effects, like "BANG-BANG!" or "BOOM-BOOM!!!" or "TICK-TOCK" in English. They are different from sound effects in English and other European languages because they can be used even in formal written Japanese, they are used in regular speech in combinations with verbs and even nouns to modify the meanings and lastly, they are much richer than in English because they can even to used to express ideas that have no "sounds" in English! For example "WAN-WAN" is the sound of a dog barking (like "WOOF-WOOF" or "BOW-WOW" in English). A sentence like "The dog barked" in Japanese would be "Inu ga WAN-WAN suru", literally "The dog will make a WOOF-WOOF!". This type of construction is very common in Japanese and especially in manga and novels where they are used for dramatic effect. They are always written in katakana. Instead of saying "It rained lightly.", the Japanese will say "It rained SAA-SAA". In order to say 'It rained heavily", they will say "It rained ZAA-ZAA". Then there is the word "SHIIIN" which is the sound of silence. Yes, in addition to the sounds of noises like "BANG-BANG" or "BOOM-BOOM" in English the Japanese also have a word for the opposite - "SHIIN" or the lack of noise. "A silent room" would be "SHIIN to suru heya", a room that goes "SHIIN"! I hope this helps! Learning Japanese can be daunting (even for speakers of other Asian languages). Good Luck!

Hi Guys, My name is Bryan and I am a Malaysian currently living in the beautiful city of Bordeaux. I am an engineer by training enjoy reading about linguistics and I absolutely love learning languages. I speak English, French, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Fujianhua (my native Chinese dialect), Tagalog, Hindi, Tamil, Burmese, Cambodian, Japanese and basic Italian and German. I am also keen on improving my Arabic especially MSA and Syrian-Lebanese dialect. Pleased to meet you all!