Medza

Oh god I have to agree on that one. It just sounds horrible and all slimy, it's hard to describe but it's just a very descriptive word.

Definitely a very good list, I would just want to say that you should be careful with movies and TV shows because often they will use a certain regional accent and also use local dialect. In particular British TV shows will contain a lot of words that are not used in America, so just be careful with what you're picking up.

I've been speaking English for the majority of my life now and even now there are words that I don't have a clue how to pronounce. My go-to tool would have to be Google and wikipedia, you can usually type in the word and they will read it out to you. It's a little better with Wikipedia because the clips are recorder manually by humans, but even the computerised reader from Google does a good job, I don't fully rely on it but it gives me a good idea.

When I first started learning a foreign language at school , there was a lot of emphasis put on getting the right grammar, and it would take up so long that after a couple of lessons you could say one sentence, and you could say it properly in all tenses and so on, but at the end of the day you only knew one sentence. I think that conversational skills are much more important than getting the grammar right the first time. I think that you should learn to talk the language , and then all the pieces will fall in place. I think that this is something of a controversial opinion so I was wondering, what do you guys think about this?

I agree, I think that some people are overly obsessed with rules which don't really matter. Ultimately, it comes down to the people to shape their own language, and no linguist can tell people how they should speak. Times simply change and the language changes with it, it's a natural ongoing process and there's nothing that we can do about it, I don't think we should even attempt changing it. Don't try fixing it, if it isn't broken.

Google has quite a lot of great linguistic features built in, you can type in 'define' followed by a word to get definition , the correct pronunciation and it's synonyms. It's really good if you're writing an essay and you want to avoid using the same word over and over again or if you don't know how to pronounce something and don't want to embarrass yourself.

Being able to properly use appropriate slang is pretty much the moment when you have mastered the language. Slang is something that has to fit in very well into the context, also your accent is important. When a foreigner tries to sound British by using slang it just sounds inappropriate and rather cringey. I think that slang and local dialects are great because they help to separate not only various countries that speak the same language, but also individual regions within that given country.

It was quite the same for me with video games, at the time I didn't even realise that I was learning English but I was quickly picking up bits of vocabulary all the time. But my formal education began in primary school like for most people.

As much as I like the idea behind it, it just never took off. According to estimates there are no more than 300,00 people that can actually talk Esperanto and there is little reason in learning a language that hardly anyone uses. Some could call it ironic because I'm currently learning Icelandic which also has about 300,000 speakers, but Icelandic is a 'real' language in the sense that it has cultural value behind it, and part of why I'm learning it is because I am very interested in the Norse culture and in particular the Icelandic sagas, but with Esperanto there's no 'native' resources which just puts me off.

I've never used it but in theory it sound good. Some people don't like the idea of not learning grammar but I think that it's good. Grammar is a fine detail which I would reserve for the experienced speakers, if you just want to learn to speak the language at a basic level then you can totally forget the grammar and learn conversational phrases.

Do something practical. Don't just make a boring list of words, that's a terrible way to learn. Play a computer game , read a book or watch a TV show. You will quickly begin to pick up new words. This works especially well in games because you are constantly using those words to play the game and your mind is active. Role Playing Games can be a bit on the heavy side for learning vocabulary but give it a shot, you will learn so much more than from sitting there with a textbook.

So there are a couple of well developed fictional languages out there, I think the two most famous ones would be Klingon from Star Trek and the Elvish langue from Lord of the Rings. I'm personally quite a big Star Trek fan and a keen linguist so I tried my hand at Klingon but I found it rather difficult to learn. Marc Orkrand the man that created the language specifically said that he wanted to create a unique language so he took the most difficult rules from all kinds of languages and mashed them together. The language is definitely speakable, I know a lady that likes to translate poems into Klingon, but for me it's more of a hobby or novelty rather than anything serious. Did anyone else here every try their hand at fictional languages? If so, how did it go?

Well, there's only so many sounds that humans can make so I think that there are bound to be some crossovers but all language groups are very different. For example the Latin based languages might sound somewhat similar, but totally different to the Chinese languages.

As others have pointed out, the best way to learn the language is to basically live it. For example with English, go to England for the duration of your summer holidays and find a job. You can learn so much more just by having day to day conversations with people than you would by having lessons once or twice a week. You will also pick up an authentic accent. After coming to England from Poland, I found that the accent that we were taught to speak in is nothing like what English people speak like. The worst pet peeve is pronouncing 'u' as 'a' so fun becomes fan , but becomes bat run becomes ran and it's it's extremely cringeworthy to someone that can actually speak the language.

When you start thinking in a foreign language that's when you are truly fluent with it. Coming from a Polish background, I found myself pretty much exclusively thinking in English these days because it's so much more relevant to what's happening around me . The only time I speak Polish would be to family members and I see them fairly rarely, so it's come to the point where thinking and speaking in Polish is just a lot of effort.

To some extent I think that they're great. It really depends on the production value of the course, if it's just some unedited footage then it probably won't be great. But if someone spends their time producing and carefully editing it then it can become a very strong asset to learn languages. I think you can safely use it to achieve beginner to intermediate levels, but I don't think you will be able to fully master the language without having proper lessons with a teacher.

I've always been quite amazed how people from certain countries can just pick up English so well. I have quite a lot of friends in Sweden that have never spoken to a native English speaker, and yet they speak better English than a lot of natives. It's great to see that some countries are really going above and beyond with learning foreign languages.

For me it was in primary school when I was 7, and I was also attending extra curricular lessons after school. But neither was very helpful in preparing me for living in England. I found that the best way to learn the language is just go to the country in which it's spoken. You will get so immersed into it and you will be completely surrounded from all side and you can just absorb it all in, rather than learn things bit at a time. I remember when I was taking lessons there was a lot of emphasis on proper pronunciation or use of tense. If you would ask an Englishman what a 'simple present' is they would look at you blankly, because those things are not taught here unless you specifically choose to study English. I found that it's more important to be able to comfortably talk to people rather than worry too much about getting the specifics right. But anyway, at what age did you start learning English, and how did it go? Did it benefit you?

I started learning English in primary school in Poland, I thought that I was pretty good, but when I eventually moved to England it was a huge shock because of how little you actually knew. I could name you all the animals in the local zoo , but I couldn't have a simple phone conversation. Learning English was a matter of survival really when you live in an English speaking country. I think that I picked it up pretty quickly, and I've also gained myself a Northern accent which some people might not see as an advantage

4 Pictures 1 Word is an Android game where you are shown 4 pictures with a common theme and you have to guess the word that connects them. It really gets you thinking and sometimes it's not as straightforward as you think . As someone that is a native speaker, I still find certain levels difficult. This app won't make you speak fluently, but it will definitely help you to expand your vocabulary. It's free to download from the Google Play store so give it a shot if you have an Android phone.

Personally I think that book dictionaries are a thing of the past. I can download a dictionary for every language in the world and fit it all on one CD, or upload it to my phone. Digital dictionaries are just straight to the point and so much convenient to carry with you. Don't get me wrong, I have a great big collection of dictionaries, but I just found myself using them less and less often. When my parents ask me 'what does this word mean?', I don't take out a dictionary, it's easier to just look it up online.

It's surprisingly good. When I first came to England, about 10 years ago, my family purchased a standalone translation program on a CD and it was terrible, you could input strings of text into it but it would just come out as garbage. But the technology has moved on significantly over the years and it is now strongly usable. It's not perfect but you should be able to make out a good 80% without any major problems.

I think that this can be very difficult or very easy depending on the native language of your students. Some languages put more emphasis on tense, others not so much. What you could do is design a table. In the far left column have the picture of someone doing something, for example a boy writing a letter. Then you can have three tables for present , past and future tenses and get your students to describe what the boy is doing now , in the future and what he's done in the past.

Agreed, I was born in Poland and lived there until I was 11, whilst I can't say what the education system was like beyond primary education, the stuff that we were taught was pretty meaningless. You would learn lists of words such as different animals or kinds of food, but you would rarely apply them in any meaningful form. Instead of learning practical conversational skills, you learn things that you are very unlikely to use in a day to day conversation.

The civilization game series has always been really good for clever and inspiring quotes, here are a few of my favourites: "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance." --Socrates "Do not wait to strike 'til the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." --William Butler Yeats "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --George Santayana You would probably be surprised how much of a language you can learn from playing game. It's easy to associate images with words and it really helps you to build up a vocabulary of some less common words.