Hedonologist

I'm not sure fun is the right word for what I'm about to talk about, but certainly satisfying or enjoyable. I find when you first look at a piece of text or hear a conversation outsides of an artifical setting and understand it, there is an overwhelming sense of achievement. When I first went to Germany and started recognizing what was being said on signs in shops, that was the first stage for me.

Indeed many people choose to learn a language either because they want access to more reading material, or they want to read material it its native languages. Many students of the ancient languages learn so that they can read great works in the languages that they were composed.

In the morning I'm a slow reader but it picks up a bit by night. When cosy I can read quite fast. I actually bought a program called eyeQ once which allows you to increase reading speed, although if you don't follow the program correctly you may hinder comprehension.

Well it's that thing again where the more language you know, the easier it is to learn more. Because I had already mastered the rolling R from other languages so it came easily to me.

Say hello in Russian Interesting video. I'd never heard of Privetik or Privetiki before, when would you use them as opposed to just privet? Also I assumed you could use privet in an informal setting but it appears not, I mean you can use 'Hi' formally in English in certain settings.

There are a few social networking sites like LiveMocha and Italki that allow you to find people who will be willing to practice with you. I'm sure you could also find people here by looking in the appropriate sub-forum.

Not really. My grammar is good enough that I doubt anyone will care about the odd mistake, and my accent is something that is just the way it is, so if anyone thinks lowly of the way I speak then it doesn't bother me, although I certainly wouldn't mind the odd compliment which is sometimes so based on my accent

The thing is that native speakers are not forced to pay attention to grammar etc. Most likely everything they know is picked up, including bad habits. When you learn another language though you study it closely and specifically do grammar drills. So even if your vocabulary will never be as large as your mother tongue, your grammar may actually be better.

Learn the Script first of all. There are many good youtube tutorials for this. Once you have mastered that many borrowed words will immediately become clear to you. After that I would recommend learning basic grammar and vocabulary, a few common verbs by rote and then use parallel texts of short stories.

It seems that Canadian English indeed is closer to American English than to British English. The accent is often indecipherable. I think that Australia and NZ have kept very close to British English while Canadian seems to have diverged quite a bit.

I generally think that they are a pretty poor indicator of a persons true skill/knowledge. For a start you should expect a minimum of 25% I suppose they work best with regards to wrote information, but even then the pass mark needs to be very high to get a realistic idea of weather a person is qualified or not.

Well to be honest I couldn't really tell you because I've never had someone say that to me before. I suppose in very small communities that are monolingual and have little contact with the outside economy that may be true. Realistically however English will always give you a major advantage both economically and educationally. So many learning materials are in English that you will severely limit yourself if you don't speak it.

I was under the assumption that Ancient Greek was more complex, therefore it would be simple for someone who has studied ancient Greek to learn modern Greek. Would anyone like to comment on their experiences transitioning from one to the other.

I've heard people say that English is the most commonly known language in Belgium, as half speak Dutch/Flemish, half speak French and everyone knows English. What's your opinion on that? I've never met a Belgian that can't speak English, so I thought there might be something to it.

Hi there, I hope you find what you're looking for here. I'm sure you will be able to learn a lot as there are many fellow Spanish and mandarin speakers and learners here.

RTE does weather and news in Irish, but apart from that there seems to be very few resources for immersion. Even the RTE broadcasts are sporadic, although useful for what they are. Are there any Irish language newspapers?

Not really apart from the odd word of simmish. I do have an interest in Conlangs, having made 1 or two myself, but never to a level of fluency. There was a large wiki about it which some of you may find interesting. http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Portal:Main

I only know English fluently, but I could recognize over 15. French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Norwegian, Arabic, Hebrew, Welsh, Indonesian, Latin, Afrikaans. If you are exposed to them for a short period it's not too difficult to be able to differentiate.

Does anyone have experience with using parallel short stories? I found an old copy that I bought many years ago and I'm reading through it now. Basically reading what I can, picking out the unrecognizable words and learning them by rote, then re-reading the text until I can read the paragraph without dictionary. So far it seems to be going very well, as vocabulary is expanding rapidly.

I think at both ends of the scale, men are disproportionately represented. Women from what I gather tend to be less monolingual than men. But the extreme hyper-polyglots seem also to be mostly men.

That depends on why they are multilingual. If it is simply from circumstance of living in a multilingual society then no, not necessarily. If they have learned it off their own motivation, then perhaps it is an indicator that they are the sort of long-sighted person. If successful at learning their language, then it would show good time management skill and perseverance. So in some circumstances I would say it is an indicator, but by no means a guarantee.

I've never though of any language other than my mother tongue. I think this is similar more many polyglots unless they have been bilingual from a very young age. I do think with the occasional foreign words, but that's only if I use it in speech also.

I don't know why but when swearing in languages other than your mother tongue it just seems so more acceptable, and doesn't 'sound' like swearing even though you know exactly what the word means. Even on TV you can get away with some foreign swear words before the watershed.

I imagine the effect is very similar to that of watching TV. Seeing as English speaking natives are rarely if ever exposed to foreign languages on TV, video games may provide one of the best platforms for this sort of immersion.

I think learning radicals is an important step for beginners, because it will make recognition of characters much easier. Not that you can't just memorise the characters by rote alone, I just found that learning even just part of the radicals helped my recognition of characters.