Hedonologist

Assuming you were only going on a short break, you probably wouldn't learn more than a few essential phrases needed to get by. But how long would you have to be staying in a country before you decided to make a serious effort at learning the language beforehand?

How many similarities do you notice between Hindi and English, or any other European language for that matter.

Whilst it vaguely sounds closer to English than to Chinese or African Click languages I can't say I've noticed any definitive similarities in vocabulary or grammar, Which I assume there must be as English and Hindi are Both Indo-European languages.

I'm not linguistic expert so I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but could anyone give me any pointers?

Ernest bender made a grammar and reader, and I wanted to ask two things really. Firstly, does anyone have any opinions on it? I know it's quite a rare book so I'm not hopeful for answers, although I thought I might as well ask. Secondly is there anywhere where I can buy a copy in the UK? It seems exceedingly rare and I think I might have to try eBay or somewhere similar.

Some people just don't have the opportunities available to be immersed daily. This is why grammar/vocabulary etc aside, I think English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because there is so much immersion whether you like it or not. Also some people may not have to time to practice or be using poor methods. I think that people are all inherently similar when it comes to language learning ability.

This would be a waste of resources no doubt, being able to organize such a trip and then students don't take advantage of it. Can you please share the location of the field trip and why didn't the interaction in the goal language happened?

It was a field trip from England to Germany. The students did engage in some level of interaction with natives, but almost all the time the students simply associated with their friends and conversed in English. Some of these field trips do indeed seem wasteful from a learning perspective.

In my experience of language field trips, I find that the students very rarely engage in conversation in the target language. Sure they may be immersed to a degree and work out what some of the signs mean, but mostly students just talk amongst themselves in the native language as much as possible.

Are you absolutely sure? Perhaps you were too drunk to notice how bad you were doing... I can imagine thinking I was speaking fluent Japanese (but actually speaking English!) if I were drunk.

Perhaps I should try it though.

Oh I'm sure, I had some natives compliment me on my not perfect, but surprisingly good ability to converse. Before that I had not really used the language outside of a Pimsluer type artificial environment, and whilst I had theoretically spoken before, I'd never had real world practice like that.

Has anyone else noticed an increase in fluency shortly after consuming alcohol. The knowledge must be there in your mind but the few times I have consumed alcohol I always notice that I'm much more willing to speak in a foreign language, and I end up doing it a lot more competently. Obviously we are talking small amounts here, not to the point of drunkenness.

There are a lot of similarities between the two, which is why I'd recommend you to not study them at the same time.

I studied Dutch first and now study German, and even now I occasionally slip in the odd German word when speaking Dutch, although for some reason I never use a dutch word when speaking German. I would say dutch grammar is harder, although German genders are certainly harder.

English is indeed part of out education, although we lack in foreign languages. It's very rare to be taught a foreign language in primary school, unless part of an extra curricular activity. English is a compulsory subject from year 1 to 11.

I think it's important also to recognize that there are sometimes occasions when it really is best just to have a day off, rather than push yourself too hard. When you are ill for example there is no point straining yourself even harder when no real progress is going to be made.

Hi there Gocek, and welcome to Linguholic Forum. It is indeed a lot of fun on this site. We all looking to talking with you too

Clearly the characters present a huge obstacle in learning Chinese, tones do too. I would have though the grammar would have cancelled that out though. The fact that English is very unphonetic also makes this article somewhat more surprising.

AI would not say necessary in English speaking countries. For most people though speaking English is necessary to be successful in life. there are a few exceptions to the rule though as many senior politicians and world leaders have only a limited grasp on English and they get on fine.

This? http://www.cambridgescp.com/Upage.php?p=clc^top^home

I don't have it, but it looks interesting and is fairly reasonably priced. $99 for each unit or $150 for both isn't bad at all.

Yes that is the course I'm referring to. I don't know where you are getting $99 from though. Book 1 is £12.75 which is roughly $20. The whole set should be no more than $80.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a beginner with a vocabulary of around 750. I'm looking for a sort of children's book to read with a dictionary. Ideally this would be in Devanagari rather than with a transliteration.

Does anyone know a good place to purchase a Hindi grammar (as in a grammar book) and maybe a reader too? I know there is one by Ernest benders that's highly recommended but I can't seem to find it.

I've used other languages before to communicate so that others cannot understand what we are saying. Actually it's often the only real world practice I ever get. When I've been learning other alphabets before like Greek and Cyrillic I've written my diary in English using those scripts so that I can both keep it secret and practice Cyrillic at the same time.

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How much are you willing to spend on each language that you learn?

I'm on quite a limited budget at the moment so I've only ever consider going up to around £60. With that I can usually get a good dictionary for £10, an Audio course for £15 and then spend the remainder on coursebooks, grammars and readers.

This may be a little off topic but I actually learned that idiom from a beautiful song with the same name by Aimee Mann. The song Par for the Course is from her album I'm with Stupid that I listened to back in the 90's. An interesting thing about that album was that in the cd booklet there was a list of all the words used in the songs, in alphabetical order. Not very useful if you actually wanted to read the lyrics but quite a funny game for an English student to listen through the songs and try to cross out each word.

I learned mine from an old comedy show that I only recently found out about on Youtube. The incident was a man explaining about inappropriate pranks in the office.

'par for the course' is mentioned at 0:16

Offline there seems to be a very limited numbers of courses available for English speakers wanting to learn Hindi, even less so for the less common Indian languages such as Gujarati. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Hindi seems to be the most underrated language compared to how many native speakers it has. This isn't a trend I can see changing unfortunately, even with India's booming economy.

I've found that the Dutch are probably the least willing to speak dutch with a non-native speaker than any other nationality. I suppose this is due to the fact that they are some of the most proficient non-native English speakers in the world.

Most English speakers will have trouble finding natives to speak to when learning a foreign language, but my experience with dutch speakers is very bizarre. Even in groups of 5/6 Dutchmen, when I am the only Englishman there they still speak English.

As a native English speaker I find that one respite of learning Dutch is that there is so much vocabulary in common. English is a Germanic language and any German student will notice the high level of vocabulary in common, but in Dutch it seems that the percentage is even higher.

If a word is similar in English and German, then it's bound to be similar in Dutch too, and there are some words like 'Cube' that are only similar in Dutch (Dutch: Kubus vs German: Wurful)

An idiom I learned today was 'par for the course' which means 'to be expected'. This is a golfing reference as a 'par' is the expected number of shots that is expected to be taken to complete a hole/course. Not a very frequent one as yesterday was the first time I had ever heard it, but interesting nonetheless.

Mine is not entirely sung in Latin so I'm not sure if you would say it counts, but it's probably one of the most popular songs that is sung partially in Latin. It's partially in french too.

One of my favourite songs of all time actually.