BWL

I think the best way is to start learning some basic spoken Chinese first before attempting to learn hanzi. This way, at least you have something to refer to when you are learning the characters. I think certain books teach hanzi in a way that utilizes mnemonics so you remember the story behind the creation of the character and this helps a lot. Many characters in Chinese like 妈妈 (mother) are made of two parts - the first part 女 means "woman" and the second part is the clue to the pronunciation 马, meaning "horse" and it is pronounced "ma". Therefore 妈 represents a word pronounced "ma" but which has something to do with being a woman, hence "ma" or "mother".

爱屋及乌 means to love ones house and even to the extent of loving the crows on the roof! 乌 means "crow" and also occurs in phrases meaning "dark clouds' or "darkness", as it is pretty obvious from the semantics. Yes, it means to love someone and everything that belongs to him or her and the surroundings as well.

Isn't "fat gai" the proper Hindi word for "torn"? As in "Aap ki patloon fat gayi hai"? "Your pants are torn?" Please correct me if I'm wrong as I am more familiar with shuddh Hindi and proper Urdu than cool street slang!

Merci beaucoup! Yes, I think you sort of can camp out in Paris CDG airport because it is huge and there are relatively clean toilets and showers available. I feel for your friend and yes, these things do happen! That said, Paris is getting colder and rainier now so I'm getting my warm clothing and putting them on standby just in case.

Yes, trying to remember all the irregular verbs can be a pain but there is no avoiding it. I remembered a friend who asked me what "j'ai vécu" meant. I told him it was the past tense form of "je vis" or "I live". He couldn't believe that "vécu" and "vis" are all forms of "vivre". There several very common irregular verbs like this.

My ex-professr has a huge collection of phrasebppks and dictionaries, even for obscure languages like Bislama, Georgian and Tongan. This I believe, is one of the marks of a true language nerd!

Doki-doki is really common! And you often see it in manga, written in katakana for emphasis and to show that the characters are excited!

The grammar of all three are very similar. I must say that Spanish and Italian are closer in pronunciation and accent than French, so it will be easier for Spaniards and Italians to understand each other compared with trying to understand a French-speaker. On the other hand, the choice of words and grammar between French and Italian are closer than in Spanish. Italians who speak Spanish using pure Italian grammar sound like they're speaking broken Spanish!

I'm curious why Sanskrit is still taught in Indian schools. While it does still have a very strong influence on Indian culture, Sanskrit as a spoken language is extinct. Most Europeans do not learn Latin or Ancient Greek anymore, and having a distinction in Sanskrit language studies will not guarantee a high-paying job.

No two languages are exactly alike and inter-language translation often requires the translator to make a conscious effort to give as close a meaning to the words of the original language as possible. I think I first heard of "komorebi" from the lyrics of a Japanese song; I can't remember which one.

When I was a child, we had 听写 or ting xie (dictation) during our Chinese language classes. The teacher would dictate a list of words (the characters would have been taught to pupils the week before, so everyone was expected to memorize them) to the pupils and we would have to write them down correctly. Any mistake would be a punishable offense!

http://www.everydaylanguagelearner.com/ Here's another interesting language learning resource. The blog owner, is raising his son in a bilingual environment and the site has numerous resources on bilingualism, second-language learning, coaching and other interesting stuff.

Welcome Kaylah! I hope you have a great time here! You will indeed find lots of members who are learning German and French (and many native speakers as well) so I do hope you have a great time here! Brian

Yes, the Japanese use it on a massive scale compared with other languages. They say things which would seem ungrammatical or similar to baby-talk in other languages, but which are perfectly grammatical in Japanese. For example, Japanese mothers usually scold their chilldren with :ちゃんとしなさい！ meaning "Do it properly!". It literally means "Do it with a "CHAN!". Here, "CHAN" is the sound of an object fitting nicely in its place, hence meaning "fittingly" or "properly".

Japanese uses a lot of onomatopoeia, much more so than Chinese and a lot of other Asian languages. Onomatopoeia are like "woof-woof", "squeak-squeak" and "bang-bang". This very interesting link explains their grammatical usages. http://nihonshock.com/2013/04/japanese-onomatopoeia/

Once you get past the pronunciation and the idiosyncratic spelling conventions, French is closer to Spanish and Italian than it is to English. The difficulty initially would be the pronunciation, with nasal vowels and many "ü" and "oe" sounds that also exist in German but not in Spanish and Italian (except northern Italian dialects like Milanese). The French "R" also would be difficult to people used to Spanish and English.

Sorry, I was using very colloquial French (some would say it is slang). "Pas mal" means "not bad" but "pas mal de" is a casual way to say "quite a few" or "quite a bit" depending on whether the word that follows can be counted or not. "Il y a pas mal de touristes americains" means "there are quite a few American tourists". and "qui se promènent autour de moi" means "who are walking around me". "Se promènent" is the present tense plural third person form of "se promener" meaning to go for a walk. It is the same as "spazierengehen" in German or 散步 in Chinese and Japanese.

I started learning Japanese because I applied for a job with a Japanese company. I was fascinated by the language and how complex it can be. It allowed me to communicated with Japanese people who have settled in my homeland, Malaysia (a common destination for retired Japanese) and as a linguist I found it typologically interesting. The grammatical structure with its various speech levels, vast array of sentence-final suffixes and unique usage of onomatopoeia all made me even more interested to improve my fluency in it. That and its challenging writing system!

Absolutely! What is interesting (and sad at the same time) is that that many languages in Australia and the Americas are going extinct. Just a handful of elders left struggling to keep the languages alive. Vanuatu has so many distinct languages that native Vanuatuans (who call themselves ni-Vanuatu) have to communicate amongst themselves in Bislama, a creole language derived from 19th century pidgin English used by sailors and traders! Most educated Vanuatuans also speak French.

I learned Urdu through the qawwaali music of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was very esoteric and meditative, not a lot of common everyday vocabulary that you could use while shopping in the markets of Pakistan and North India!

I also notice that the Portuguese in Portugal and Brazil are very different especially in pronunciation and some vocabulary (not so much in the written and formal forms). The spoken form of Brazilian also uses a lot of slang that is different from European Portuguese. European Portuguese sounds very fast and guttural and many vowels are not pronounced and sound like a cross between French and Russian. Brazilian Portuguese is more musical and fluid.

In British, I notice that "pissed" and "pissed drunk" are more commonly used. This can be confusing for Americans as "pissed" means more like "to be extremely angry with someone".

Hi! I just landed in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport this morning at 6.00 am local time. Everything was smooth except for my luggage getting lost somewhere between Kuala Lumpur and Paris and I was promised by Air France that they would deliver my suitcase directly to my house in Bordeaux within 3 days! I never expected the Parisian airport staff to be so nice! (Enough with the stereotypes about rude Parisians). Anyway as I am writing this, I'm sitting in the waiting hall at Gare Montparnasse eating half a baguette and watching the world go by...... Et oui, il y a pas mal de touristes américains qui se promènent autour de moi.

Welcome to the forum! I'm sure you will find lots of opportunities here to practise your English and yes, it would be nice if you could help teach and share Spanish with the rest of the members here too!

I guess it depends on your goals and motivations. I always had the impression that Spanish spelling and pronunciation were easier and more regular than English and French. The important thing is to practise and listen to the language a lot, watch a lot of movies and listen to Spanish songs etc. The idea is to submerge yourself in a Spanish-language environment. I hope this helps! Good luck!