BWL

Absolutely, I got current job precisely because I was fluent in a second (and third) language. I strongly believe that employers realise that one language is not enough in this increasingly globalised world.

This story is a true inspiration. A native Alaskan language whose last native speaker recently passed away is now being revived by Michael Krauss, a linguistics professor and a 21-year-old Frenchman from Le Havre who had decided at a young age to learn this amazing language and help ensure it's survival.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704499604575407862950503190

As a linguist, I can verify that the Eyak language (together with it other distant relatives which are spoken from Alaska and Canada's Pacific Northwest all the way down to the American Southwest) is extremely complex and cannot even be written in the Roman alphabet. Instead, a modified from of international phonetics has to be developed for it.

I say, bravo to Guillaume and his ongoing quest to revive the culture and language of a dying people. The world needs more people like him.

There aren't really any sites, but Colloquial Tamil book does this well. It teaches only colloquial and not the formal writtern Tamil

Thanks Meera!

Yes, I much prefer improving my colloquial Tamil as it's just so practical especially when living in a country like Malaysia where Tamil is the 4th most commonly-spoken language (apart from Malay, English and Chinese).

This is a blog by Benny the Irish polyglot. He has an incredible blog with a lot of language learning tips as well as a lot of information for language fanatics like us!

http://www.fluentin3months.com/irish-language/

Irish is not the only language he speaks fluently, of course!

Here are some useful tips on correctly guessing (most of the time!) the gender of a German noun.

http://german.about.com/cs/vocabulary/a/nsuffix.htm

I hope this helps!

This was exactly how I learned some basic Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. There is no doubt that watching television is a great way to learn a language!

The difference between traditional and simplified characters is basically in the number of strokes per character. There is no other difference in pronunciation, grammar or sentence structure. A person who is comfortable with reading and writing in simplified characters will not have any problems with learning traditional characters and vice versa so long as he or she is sufficiently well-versed.

Interesting! I see many parallels between the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. The lack of short vowels (meaning that one has to guess them based on context), the use of diacritics to indicate the vowels in highly formal texts, the right-to-left direction of writing and even the names of letters are very similar in Hebrew and Arabic.

I totally agree that a lack of practice can bring down one's level of proficiency in a given language. The fact is that even hyperpolyglots or people who speak a large number of languages need to practise constantly to maintain their fluency.

http://tagaloglang.com/

This is another link that you could use in case you were unable to open the other one. This link isn't as comprehensive as the previous one but it's a start. 

There is also the negation with "personne" which means either "a person" in the phrase "une personne" or "no one" as in "je ne connais personne"or "I don't know anyone" or "i know no one".

There is "rien" or "nothing" which works in the same way. "Je ne sais rien" or '"I don't know anything" or "I know nothing".

The basic ones that you will encounter all the time are:

wa (topic) , ga (nominative / subject) , o (accusative / object), ni (dative), de (locative) and e (directional). Most beginners tend to confuse wa with ga.

Think of particles as markers that explain the function of every word or phrase in a sentence and their syntactic roles. In a sentence, someone has to act on something and then there might be movement or even a location; all these are explained by particles in Japanese.

This is a clip of a friend of mine (a Belgian-Chinese polyglot) who reads a text in 4 different Chinese dialects; Mandarin, Chaozhou or Teochew 潮州話, Cantonese and Taiwanese.

If you want to hear how diverse-sounding Chinese dialects can be, just watch the video.

Interesting, does this meant that there are some letter in Hebrew that are pronounced the same way? For example "Tet" and "Tav" ?

I guess that in Biblical Hebrew they might have had different pronunciations but they are now pronounced identically in Modern Hebrew. Also the "Alef" and ""Ayin" might have been pronounced similar to the "Alif" and the "'ain" of Arabic?

With French, it helps to speak and listen to as much of it as possible. You will understand it eventually when your ears learn to pick up the sounds and your vocabulary increases.

This is interesting because nowadays technological advancement has enabled us to live in a virtual borderless world. We can watch movies from anywhere in the world thanks to TV and the Internet and although this process has been going on for a long time now (since cinemas and then TV came into existence in the 20th Century), globalisation will only increase exponentially! I do not know how traditional aspects of different cultures will survive the onslaught of globalisation.

I'm in Istanbul now and I am surprised how European everything looks! Only a hundred years ago everyone was in turbans and veils!

BWL's link didn't open for me either. Here's a video where a small lesson in Ubykh is taught in French:

It's hard to make out what he says, but starting at 1:50, he talks about a few words that start with the letter q, which would make a "kha" sound, or something similar to that. "Courire" is jogging, "la tombe" is the grave, and "la parole" is speech. I can't make out the rest of what he says.

Oops, I'm not sure what's wrong but the files play on my laptop. Anyway here is a youtube clip. The narrator speaks French for the first couple of seconds but the rest is Tevfik speaking Ubykh and it DOES not sound like French! :-)

In Asia, I would recommend learning Malay or Indonesian (they're different dialects of the same language, like American English and Australian English). They  are written in the Roman alphabet and have no tone, verb tenses, noun cases, irregular nouns and verbs and you make words plural by doubling them.

house = rumah

houses = rumah-rumah

I can distinguish between pretty much all the major European and Asian languages. I would love to learn how to distinguish between the various Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Saudi, Yemeni, Lebanese, Iraqi, etc.).

I still cannot distinguish between Russian and Ukrainian.

I'm keen to improve my spoken Tamil. I lived in Malaysia where there is a huge Tamil population. I also know that the pronunciation of words while speaking often barely resembles the written form (English is a little bit like this as well). I was wondering if there are any sites out there that teach colloquial pronunciation?

Hi!

I was wondering if there is an easy way to teach Arabic pronunciation to foreigners who are not trained in linguistics (in other words 99.9% of new language learners). Are there effective ways to teach them to pronounce the "ghain, qaf, Khaa, hamza, 'ain, daad and other distinctive sounds used in Arabic, in both Fusha and Aamiyya?

I always notice foreigners have horrible accents when they speak Arabic, but I think it is due to the unique sounds of the language.

Yes I heard an Arab tourist say something like "I'm from Gatar". I guess this is a typical accent in a large part of the Arab world. I also have Tunisian friends who pronounce the "qaf" sound as it is in Classical Arabic but in general their dialect is much harder to understand than Egyptian or Lebanese.

I've always loved the Swedish pronunciation in particular the use of different accents (the flat versus the musical one) to differentiate words. I know that "anden" can have two meanings depending on the word melody. How do you differentiate this in writing? Is it something that you have to guess from the context and content of the sentence that you are reading?

You have to treat "Qu'est-ce que c'est" as an idiomatic expression. It can even be used in certain expressions other than in question form, for example "Qu'est-ce qu'elle est belle!" meaning "She's so beautiful" or "Wow, she's beautiful".

I love chuchoter (to whisper) and murmurer (to murmur) they really evoke the sensations of and sounds of whispering and murmuring.

Also "choisisser" meaning "to choose". The action of your tongue as it moves back and forth while pronouncing this word mimics the actions of your hands when you choose and select something.