BWL

www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/‎ Hi Meera, You can try the above site. I learned quite a lot of grammar from this site. I am not sure if the link is still working as the site was down for a couple of days, but you can give it a try. Good Luck!

Well done! I'm going to promote this to my translator and linguist friends!

It's nice to find something that you can identify with when you learn a particular language and about the culture that speaks it. I find that many people are fascinated by Japanese culture or cuisine or even Japan's modern manga, anime and cosplay pop culture. The more you are fascinated and interested the more your mind becomes receptive to learning the particular language.

I like "bungang-tulog" meaning dreams and literally meaning "sleep-fruit". Dreams are literally the fruits of our sleep. "Makati ang paa" ot "itchy feet" refers to someone who likes going places.

Thai script is complex because it was adapted from the ancient Khmer script (a totally unrelated language) and the Khmer script was adapted from an ancient Indian script called Brahmi.The result is a script that has a very complex relationship to the spoken language. From what I understand (I'm not a native speaker but I used to live near the Thai border and had many Thai-speaking friends) the pronunciation of Thai has changed over the last thousand years and the reason so many consonants have high. mid and low versions is that the old sounds which were pronounced differently a thousand years ago are now pronounced alike but still use different letters. Also a lot of words were borrowed from Sanskrit so there are special letters that are used to write these words but the catch is that they are pronounced exactly as in Thai, only spelled with different letters because they are of Sanskrit origin

I speak a dialect of Chinese native to the Southeast coast of China and also spoken on neighboring Taiwan. It is not intelligible with either Mandarin or Cantonese. This dialect, called Min or Fujianese also preserves many words and expressions and even pronunciations from Ancient Chinese that have gone out of vogue in Mandarin (Cantonese still has many but not to the same extent as in my dialect).

It's interesting because I'm in Istanbul for a few days. There is a South African gentleman (actually he's from Lesotho, which is a landlocked country inside South Africa) who speaks Sesotho, a language related to Xhosa and Zulu and they use exotic click sounds too (although not as many as in Xhosa and Zulu). I believe I posted a clip a while back of Miriam Makeba singing in her native Xhosa langauge. It sounds incredibly beautiful and exotic.

Yes I think it is a good idea to just post your message on the translation section. There are many helpful members on this forum! Good luck!

Yes I notice this too."Yaru" seems to often appear with the object "wo" particle. I think "suru" is used in fixed phrases like "benkyou suru" while "yaru" seems to be separate verb all by itself.

I find reading to be really difficult. Not only do we have to handle the kanji, hiragana and katakana but the kanji can have several pronunciations depending on the context and this I find to be the most difficult aspect of learning Japanese.

I'm not a native speaker but I can say that, having worked in a Japanese company for over 3 years, superiors are referred to by titles like "Shachou" etc. There are suffixes used in casual conversation or when addressing younger people like "-kun" for boys and "-chan" for girls that replace "san". The full formal version of "san" is "sama" and is now used only to refer to royalty.

By the way, how was your 文言 class? Did you find it interesting? I believe Ancient Chinese had a very different grammar from modern Chinese dialects. Did you find the texts easy to understand?

Yes, I've read about this character, it must take several minutes to write! Thank goodness it is not in common use anymore!

There are many similarities between Filipino dialects / languages with Malay and Indonesian. We say "sayang" too! I always find the Tagalog verbs to be confusing due to the dozens (hundreds?) of forms for a single word; bumili, bumibili, bibili, binili, binibili, bibilhin, bilhin, makabili, nakabili, nakakabili, makakabili, ibili etc. and so on and so forth! It's a very rich language with so many shades of meaning to a word!

I almost forgot, another interesting one is 虎頭蛇尾 , literally "to have a tiger's head and a snake's tail" meaning someone or something that starts strong but gradually weakens and finishes weakly. This could be used for athletes in a race, contestants in a game or even the stock market!

One of my favorite is 馬馬虎虎. It means as "casually" or "carelessly". It does sound as sloppy as it means! (Word for word, it literally means horse-horse-tiger-tiger!).

Yes, how do you write "kotoshi" in kanji? I often made the same mistakes when I was starting as I am of Chinese origin and am more familiar with the Chinese usage of hanzi or kanji. Japanese is just plain confusing compared to Chinese! I always laugh at how "ebi" or "shrimp / prawn" is often written in kanji 海老 !

Someone once asked me what is the difference between "suru" and "yaru" because in English, they both mean "to do". I think "suru" tends to be used in phrases like "benkyou suru" or "ai suru" or even when ordering at a restaurant "Gohan ni shimasu". It tends to be used in fixed phrases while I notice that "yaru" means simply "to do" or even "to make". I also think "yaru/yarimasu" tends to be more blunt and direct than "suru/shimasu". What do you guys think about this usage? Cheers, Brian

Hiragana and katakana weren't the problems for me, it was learning kanji that gave me headaches! I often had difficulty learning the various readings and pronunciations which, in Chinese have only one pronunciation. in Japanese, if you combine certain characters together or if you add hiragana to them, the pronunciations and meanings may change drastically.

Absolutely! I just started using it a month ago (yes, I'm very late!) and I feel that this is the best app so far for Chinese language learners! It's amazing!

The Philippine languages are full of Spanish words. I remember even common verbs like: maglaba (to wash) is from Spanish "lavar" magsara (to close) is from "cerrar" magtrabaho is from "trabajo", or "work"

Yes, I was also taught to say (by a German friend) "Es ist mir kalt", as a more formal or polite way to say I am cold. Literally it means, "It is cold to me". Never use the English "I am..." construction in this circumstance.

Like many languages, German has its irregularities. The rules for determining gender exist but in some cases are irrgular and the gender of many nouns has to be memorised by learners.

The problem is that my iPhone touch screen jisho app is quite sensitive to stroke order so if you forget which stroke comes first then the system might not recognise the word.

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I know about 2000 kanji (Japanese usage and pronunciations both onyomi and kunyomi) and can understand a lot of written Japanese but I keep getting them confused with my native tongue (Chinese). I think the situation is parallel with French and English. The English language has tons of French words but with different pronunciations and even different meanings. For example 'gain' and 'gagner' are quite different in meaning and 'profit' and 'profiter' as well.