BWL

It's difficult and rare but it is not impossible. However personally I always find it easier to make friends and to maintain that friendship when we have a common language. I guess that's why I joined this forum!

I'm more keen to improve my spoken Tamil rather than written. I think in Malaysia and Singapore people have an accent that is closer to that spoken in Madurai and the central districts rather than Madras. I'm really keen to improve my colloquial Tamil.

I have a Brazilian friend whose husband is Portuguese. They often make fun of each other's accents and choice of words. I remember the husband always saying "casa de banho" for "toilet" and the wife would laugh and say, "In Brazil that sounds like "bath house"!".

Well my Tagalog is quite rusty but I remember there is a word to show politeness that they tag on to almost every sentence; "po" or "ho", when speaking with strangers or with their elders. It really does not have an English translation and Filipino speakers often use "Sir/Madam" when they speak English in order to replace "po/ho" but it sounds a bit stilted and just unnatural in English!

The main problem for me is trying to remember which words are masculine and feminine when they end in a consonant. For words like "kitaab", "aag" and "prem", for example, you have to memorise the gender of the word as there is no "-a" or "-i" at the end to signal the gender.

One of the things I love about German (and Dutch) is the immense propensity for using agglutinative words especially nouns. They simply stack on word after word (with the last word being the one that has the core meaning) to describe pretty much any object.

Je pense que la difficulté d'apprendre la langue fançaise est dû à la différence entre la langue parlée et la langue écrite. L'accent français avec les enchaînements entre les mots et surtout l'absence d'un accent tonique, est tellement difficile à comprendre. Je connais beaucoup d'amis étrangers qui arrivent à lire les textes en français mais qui comprennent pas la parlée.

1Q84 is definitely one of my favorites. And yes, the novel is very much inspired by George Orwell. Even when read aloud in Japanese, 1Q84 sounds like 1984!

Has anyone ever tried using Pleco? It's not so much a study app as a quick reference dictionary. I've used it a lot and really, it has been a blessing! The upgraded version can be used to search for characters using the touch screen (stroke order is essential here!) and I quite like the dictionary and word list because they give examples of usage. It even has dictionaries for German and French!

I also listen to mostly Nancy Ajram and Amr Diab. There were some good Moroccan singers as well who sang in Masri and Lubnaani dialects (both being so much easier to understand) as well as their own native dialects, but I just can't recall their names.

I am always fascinated by Creole languages. How is is different from mainstream British / American English? Does it use a lot of Hindi and African words? Is it a common street language in Guyana, and would it be allowed to be used say, in schools? In some countries, schools only teach "proper" English or French, and any Creole-speaking students would be severely punished! Unjust and unfair but that was (and probably still is) how things are done in some places.

In mine it's a bit more grammatical. There is a preposition in Malay / Indonesian meaning "in" or "at" which is "di". I could say "di Malaysia" meaning "in Malaysia" or "di Amerika" meaning "in America". There is also another :"di-" which is a prefix to show the passive. So "dimakan" means "it's being eaten", "ditolak" means "it's being pushed" and "ditulis" means "it is being written". The "di" shows that the verb is in the passive. The problem is that the preposition meaning "in" is always written separately from the main word while the one used as passive is always written together. A lot of people confuse them in writing and do not know when to put a space and when to join the words.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est?" is just a typical French way to say "What is this?" The French like complex sentences like this (just kidding) that would make no sense in related languages like Italian and Spanish. This type of sentence structure is very common even in spoken French, Est-ce que tu as faim? Is a slightly more polite but still colloquial way to say "Are you hungry?" (literally, "Is it that you have hunger?"). You could also say "Tu as faim?" or even "T'as faim?" but it would be brusque and can even be impolite when spoken in the wrong intonation and to the wrong people.

Hi I am a native speaker of Malay and Indonesian and I notice that Tagalog has many words in common, some with slightly different meanings but still close. Words like "sayang", "tolak", "minum", "langit", "muka", "paha", "telinga", "surat", "putih", etc. are very close in these languages. The one difference between Tagalog and Malay/ Indonesian is that Tagalog and other Filipino languages have huge numbers of forms for inflected words. For example, you can say (please correct me if I'm wrong, as I learned Tagalog years ago) - bili, bumili, bumibili, bibili, binili, binibili, bibilhin, binilhan, binibilhan, bibilhan, makabili, nakabili, nakakabili, makakabili, ibili, etc ad inifinitum (well almost). Are there good sites or learning materials to help learn all those forms of words and their functions in a sentence? Thanks

One of the striking differences to me is that Brazilians use "voce" for "you" regardless of whom they speak with. People in some regions use "tu" but they mix up the conjugations with the 3rd person. They also like to use "a gente" in place of "nos" or "we". The most striking difference is the accent and intonation. Brazilian Portuguese has a lot of Amerindian and African influences and will sound more musical and fluid than the harsher, more guttural intonation of European Portuguese.

The best way to learn keigo is to get used to using it in everyday circumstances (therein lies the problem, if you do not live in Japan, then it will be difficult to find people who are fluent in it to practice with). In Japan for example, shop assistants and company receptionists are usually well-versed in keigo. I usually have trouble understanding highly formal Japanese. For learners, while there are many regular rules, in general keigo can also be highly irregular and involves memorising a lot of new vocabulary.

Enakku konjam Tamil teriyum. There are many Indians of Tamil origin living in Malaysia and I used to learn a few common phrases while growing up. Most Tamils here (just as in India) do not speak Hindi and are usually trilingual in Tamil, Malay and English.

Learning MSA or al-Fusha is probably a good idea. It allows people access to the wealth of Arabic literature from the vast Arab and Islamic world. However a person who is fluent in Fusha would not be able to communicate in areas like Morocco or Tunisia where the dialects are very different from MSA. I understand a lot of Moroccan when the speakers use a lot of French (ironically) and very little when they pronounce Arabic words according to their own phonological system. It almost sounds like they drop most of the vowels in their words so "coffee" sounds like "qhwa".

I like the one which goes "Je mets des cordes a mon arc" or "I put strings on my bow (the one for shooting arrows). This means a person who is a jack-of-all-trades or one who has to multi-task and do a lot of things simultaneously.

Thanks! I did a linguistics course in university and had learned about Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew. I totally forgot most of what i learned about Arabic but yes, I had some Arab-speaking friends telling me about the use of numbers like 7,3 and 2 to represent Arabic sounds that do not exist in English and other European languages. Nice to meet you!

Try to remember this rule: The opposite of "a lot" is "a bit"or "a little". Logically if you can write "alot" then you should also be able to write "abit" and "alittle". But do "abit" and "alittle" exist? No. Ditto for "alot". It is only "a lot" that exists.

I've noticed this trend as well with my younger Indian friends. In Malaysia, where most of the Indian community is of Tamil origin,. "Hello", "hi" and it's variants have supplanted formal Tamil greetings like "Vanakkam" except when greeting elderly people. This trend is probably evolving at an even faster pace among overseas Indian communities than within India.

I agree, this is very productive in English but not exceptionally so, depending on the Latin loanword it was taken from. You can say "insidious" but not "sidious". You can say "instigate" but not "stigate".

Another favorite word is "angst". It has a different meaning in English though. It originally means "fear" in German but in English has taken on a meaning closer to "anxiety", "depression" or "internal turmoil". I'm surprised no one has mentioned "deli" from German "Delikatessen".

I studied Comparative Linguistics when I was at university, 10 years ago. It was fun, we had great courses and I specialized in Southeast Asian languages (Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, Cambodian and Burmese). I still remember most of what i learned, which comes in handy while traveling in the region.