Czarownica

But... Price and prize aren't the same word at all, are they? :confused: Price is like, how much something costs, while prize is an award. Also, I thought advice was a noun ("Let me give you some advice!") and advise was a verb ("I like to advise.")

Karma is awarded by other users If you like somebody's post, you can click "applaud" under their avatar and they'll get +1 karma. Edit: I just noticed I have 1 karma point, that's nice Is there any way to check who gave it to me, or at least for which posts?

I don't know if it's useful, but I'd feel really stupid if I wasn't able to write in the language I'm studying. My college teaches handwriting kanji too (well, after all they need to have a way to do kanji tests to see if we remember kanji) and writing kanji is honestly no more difficult than learning the meaning and reading. I see no reason not to study writing kanji. But is it necessary? I don't know.

Well, they taught me that in college, so I already knew that It might seem like a huge number, but we have to remember that some countries use multiple languages. I think the higher number is more likely, because we still don't know all the languages that are out there. There used to be even more of them, but some languages are dying out.

Because I'm not good at anything else I just like learning languages. I think it leads to so many opportunities and also improves the way we think and view the world. I also hope I'll be able to get a job as a translator or something like that, but maybe I'm just being naive here...

Eh, it's not helping me much. I have some minor hearing issues and I guess I'm just not good at listening, because even when I already knew English pretty well I rarely understood anything. I had to become really, really good in order to understand entire songs. When I listen to music in Japanese I don't understand much. I guess I should practice more...

I'm not too keen on Livemocha, personally, but I know it does work for some people. First thing you should do is learn hiragana and katakana. Those syllabaries are the absolute basics of Japanese language. You can find some free resources for that online (for example http://gahoh.marinebat.com/), but if you want a textbook, I highly recommend Remembering the Kana by James W. Heisig. If you want to see some more recommendations and information about kana, I wrote an article about it some time ago, so I hope it's ok to shamelessly promote it here: http://www.zujava.com/learning-japanese-how-to-learn-hiragana-and-katakana After you know kana, you can do everything else I think this site http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/ is great for learning Japanese grammar, but I'd really recommend getting a textbook.

OK, everybody, have some more resources! As I've said, Talk To Me in Korean made two lovely videos for people learning hangul... Unfortunately, there were supposed to be three more videos that never got made, so you won't be able to learn entire hangul from those videos. Still, they are good, so check them out: And here are some written lessons - no videos, but they do have a lot of audio files: http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Learn_hangeul

Ah, yes, agglutinative languages. I think Finnish is agglutinative too. They look quite nightmarish, but I think that if you try to treat every word as a separate sentence rather than a word, then it might look a bit easier. It has a lot of rules, after all.

Well, from a linguistic point of view there is no such thing as the most difficult language. It's because people find different languages difficult, depending on what their own native language is. For example, Korean people don't find Japanese as difficult as people from other countries do, since Korean grammar has many similarities to Japanese grammar. I don't think Japanese is anywhere near the most difficult languages anyway - it has no cases, and cases are my worst nightmare in language learning I also have no problems with pronunciation, since Japanese vowels are pronunced the same as Polish vowels - and the majority of consonants is identical, too. I think that my native language, Polish, is very difficult - we have nine cases! Obviously, it's not difficult for native speakers, but I can't even imagine trying to learn Polish if I weren't a native speaker. I don't think it's the most difficult language though... I think I'd have problems picking one. Arabic and Finnish look very hard to me, but I don't really know enough about them to make a definite judgement.

In Polish it's "mama" and "tata". I can see it's quite similar to Tagalog, of all things :amazed: I thought that the word "papa" is not present in Polish, but then I remembered the old-fashioned, affectionate term "papcio", so I guess that'd count.

Yes, actually, it's very easy! Well, almost, I made one mistake I've checked it with Google a while ago, though, and here's the correct version: 강 (gang) 남 (nam) 스(sy) 타 (ta) 일(ir) I had problems with the first part, before I remembered that putting the circle in the bottom row makes the "ng" sound. I also had some doubts about this part: 일, but I assumed that it'll use ㄹ, because they don't really have l sound and I was right! The part where I was wrong was 스, I didn't know that it's supposed to have ㅡ at the bottom and I put ㅇ there.. But putting a ㅇthere would add a "ng" sound, so in retrospect I must say I've been pretty stupid

Reporting from the battlefield: I can read hangul now! The comic I've posted is pretty useful (although the author simplified some readings, Korean doesn't sound exactly like that), but I've also found very helpful lessons here: http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Learn_hangeul Talk To Me In Korean also has hangul lessons, but only two - they were supposed to make three more parts, but it never happened Too bad, because those two first videos were really helpful. Also, it might be just my impression, but I think Korean sounds, just like Japanese sounds are more similar to some Polish sounds than to English sounds. The guy in one tutorial video made a big deal of how "ㅡ" is a special sound, because there's no sound like that in English and then he started to elaborate on how to put your lips and tongue to make this sound... and then I've heard it and realised that it sounds just like Polish "y". ...I guess I'll have to learn Korean now!

I've just stumbled across this: http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-to-read-korean-in-15-minutes It looks pretty fun and actually helpful (it's suprisingly difficult to find a good hangul reading tutorial, let alone one that doesn't make it look like an impossible nightmare), I might try it later

I prefer written tutorials. It's easier to get back to a part I want to re-read. Also, for me it's easier to focus on a written text rather than on a video. However, one advantage video tutorials have over text tutorials is having audio. Being able to actually listen to the language is a huge plus.

I do this all the time It's really helpful, unless you want to check for some very specific and rarely used grammar construction. I wonder whether it works well for languages that aren't very popular. I guess I should have known that I wasn't the only one who thought of that method

I'm afraid there's no funny story behind that I just like witches and I think I have all the necessary characteristics of one (i.e. being stubborn and very easily bored, among other things )

My mum claims that my first word was "dupa" (which means, well, "ass") as a response to her saying "Will you finally go to sleep?". That wasn't exactly a word, more like a random noise made by little children (I was only several months old) so I don't think it counts I think my first word was "mama" but I'm not really sure at the moment.

Do you know kanjidamage? It's probably my favorite kanji website. It's rather unorthodox, though. It gives some kanji parts funny names ("George Michael's mustache" being my favorite) and uses some quite nasty words sometimes, but it's also highly informative. It has a list of radicals, a list of kanji, for nearly every kanji it lists example phases/words (with an information how often they're used) and similar looking kanji. http://kanjidamage.com/

Eh, for me remembering mnemonics takes more time than remembering that thing that I'm learning I'm pretty sure my favorite kana learning book ever, Remembering the Kana had some mnemonics in it. The mnemonics you linked are quite cute, but I guess I'm lacking imagination, because I have a hard time seeing hiragana shapes there

When you talk to somebody about a book you've read and you can't remember what language was the book in. When you get annoyed with stupid pseudo linguistic jokes (like fake Chinese names) and you see that they don't even make sense, because they don't sound anything like the language they are making fun of. I had this problem in my Latin class last year When we were doing translations I kept thinking that this sentence looks wrong and that it could use some "wa" or "ga"

For me, correct grammar is very important. I see no point in learning things if I won't be able to speak and write correctly later. I can understand that some quick courses are more focused on quickly gaining the ability to write and speak, but I think that stressing the importance of correct grammar should be a big part of every other language course.

Well, I'm really torn and I think I'll abstain for now. I'd love to see a Thai subforum, but as far as I know there aren't really any members here other than me that are learning Thai (and I haven't really started yet, to be honest) so it could be rather empty. I think Korean, French and Italian seem to be the most reasonable choices, since many people study those languages.

I love that one too I was confused when I saw it for the first time, I thought it was some secret code or something. My other favorite is "It's raining cats and dogs". It's just so random. But in Polish we have an expression "pogoda pod psem" which literally means "the weather [is] under the dog" which means bad weather. I wonder whether associating bad weather with dogs is a thing in other languages too.

Oscar Wilde said (and wrote) some awesome things He really was an excellent writer. My favorite quote by him is "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."