Czarownica

Yes, and if you can visualize how many fish are in the sea... it's easier to accept there are a lot more potential partners out there.

Along the same line, we often say "better throw that one back", meaning it is not a good match or there is something wrong with that person and it is time to move on.

There are a lot of sayings we use when it comes to relationships and fish. "He's a good catch." "That one got away." and "I'm hooked." are some others which come to mind.

Wow, I'll stop here, but there are a lot more out there. People and fish... I guess dating is a lot like fishing.

That's actually something linguists call the conceptual metaphor. A conceptual metaphor is when you understand one idea in terms of another. You have two domains, source domain and target domain. In this case, the metaphor would be "relationships are fishing" (the conceptual metaphor is presented as a sentence "X is Y") - relationships is target domain, while fishing is the source domain.

Hopefully I'm not going too offtopic, but I think it's pretty interesting Wikipedia has a pretty decent article on it, if anybody's interested in that - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor

Thank you for your detailed answer I am aware of those things and that's why I think learning Thai might be difficult. I also have a slight hearing inpairment and I wonder whether it'll influence my ability to learn the tones.

I know I have to start with learning the script, I'm just not sure what I'll do after that.

I'm so jealous of you leaving so close to the Thai border. I live close to the German border which is nice too, but German is not a very exciting country

I can't imagine doing something like that, even though I study Japanese in college and I have many friends with whom I could have tried speaking Japanese only - not too many native speakers, though. I guess this approach could work if you don't really have any duties and can just spend time and money on getting your environment 100% Japanese-like, but I don't think this would work well for a normal person.

I love FreeRice, it's a great site. Also, you can change settings and practice things other than English vocabulary! They also have French, German, Spanish, Italian and Latin, as well as many categories that don't have anything to do with languages.

Just click the "subject" tab at the top of the site and you can see them all

Anybody here studying Thai? I want to start studying it soon, but I'm worried. I've chosen this language because I love the way it looks and I think it sounds pretty, too, but it looks like it'd be a nightmare to self-study. If anybody here knows or studies Thai, I'd be grateful for some tips

Here's a really interesting site with lots of videos:

https://www.erin.ne.jp/en/

It has grammar explanations as well as short movies that are great for practicing listening. There are also vocabulary segments, some games and cultural quizes (that are quite difficult sometimes!).

For me, it's "duper". I just can't take this word seriously, it just sounds so silly to me. Mostly because I'm very immature and it reminds me of the Polish words "dupa" (which means "ass") and "dupek" (which means "asshole") 

I don't think it's a word that native English speakers are particularly fond of, anyway.

Too bad, because he really was everywhere last year Gangnam Style was really popular in Poland, too. Our TV even had a famous Polish singer dance the Gangnam Style dance on the New Year's Eve for  some reason. 

I actually quite like this song :angel:

I recently discovered this site and I must say it looks pretty good. It uses movies (clips from real TV shows and movies, music videos and their own short films) to teach Chinese. They have subtitles for every movie, example sentences and a nice review system.

You can find it here:

www.fluentu.com

So far they only teach Chinese, but apparently they are working on Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French and German courses as well.

Could anybody recommend me a good German textbook for beginners? I used to know some German, but I forgot pretty much everything and now I really want to start learning German again. What is the best book to get?

I really like this blog, but I think this particular blog post boils down to "learn 23 kanji a day". I could use some more tips.

Also, I don't think Remembering the Kanji is a great book. It's nice for remembering what the kanji looks like and maybe the basic meaning, but it's pretty terrible when it comes to readings and it doesn't teach any compounds at all.

I know he's a genius polyglot and I'm pretty much nobody, but I don't think this method works for the majority of people who study Japanese.

Korean popculture got pretty popular in the West in the recent years. K-pop and Korean dramas have a lot of fans. That makes Korean a very popular language to study. I think Talk to Me in Korean is one of the most popular language learning blogs right now. It seems to be quite interesting.

Next thing you know, OMG, BS, and LOL will become words that are recognized in the dictionary. What is next?

I think some dictionaries already recognize some Internet acronyms as real English words.

I don't necessarily agree with all the changes, but well, languages evolve. Several centuries ago people were complaining about words and grammar constructions that we all find perfectly normal now

When I was five or so I started reading my aunt's English textbooks and playing video games in English I think it was the beginning of my adventure with foreign languages. We also had some basic English classes in kindergarden.

At the age of seven I started elementary school and then they started teaching me German.

This is probably the best and biggest database of Japanese grammar explanations available on the Internet at the moment. It uses the old JLPT level system for some reason.

http://dev.jgram.org/pages/links.php

For people who want a good grammar book, I recommend The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and The Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar.

I think esperanto is a wonderful idea, but I don't think it's very useful in practice. I agree with LauraM's point about no cultural enrichment.

I'd rather spend time and effort learning a "normal" language. I don't like the way Esperanto sounds and looks anyway.

In general, traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan and simplified ones in China, so I think that learning simplified characters might be more useful.

Simplified characters aren't really easier to learn, though, as some people might believe

The basic Japanese phonetic script is known as Hiragana. This is basically the Japanese writing system. I'm just wondering if we can learn how to speak Japanese without learning Hiragana. How important Hiragana is in learning the Japanese language?

It's the absolute basics. I don't see why would anybody try learning Japanese without learning hiragana. If it's because learning another writing system is too difficult, then I would suggest those people to give up on trying to learn Japanese, because pretty much everything else in this language is more difficult than hiragana.

I don't think it's possible to learn how to speak Japanese without hiragana, even if you don't want to read or write. And even if it were possible, I can't imagine why anybody would do that.

Loanwords in Japanese are one of the reasons why katakana is so useful. Even if you don't know anything except from katakana, you'll still recognize something.

My favorite loanwords in Japanese must be ダイイング·メッセージ (daingu messeeji) which means "dying message". Isn't it just lovely?

Also, if you watched Sailor Moon when you were a child, you might remember ミラクル ロマンス (mirakuru romansu) from their opening song

Some time ago I decided that I should get a dictionary app for my mobile phone, so I asked my Japanese class and they recommended me JED. It's a free Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary and a kanji dictionary as well.

You can find it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.umibouzu.jed

What dictionary app do you use?

If you don't have Rikaichan yet, I highly recommend getting it!

It's a dictionary plug-in for Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird. When you hover your mouse over a Japanese word, it gives you translation and also shows you how to read the kanji.

You can find it here:

http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

It's really useful, because it gives pretty accurate translations.

It might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that katakana is no harder than hiragana. I've learned katakana in a few hours and after some practice I had no problems with it, except from forgetting how to write "so" and "n" (I often confuse them).

Katakana really is a piece of cake compared to kanji, so be brave and you can deal with it!

I don't think tutor can help you much in learning kanji anyway. Learning online is not a bad idea, but you need a site that will have:

1) stroke order

2) readings

3) example use (some people argue that it's optional, but I think that if you just learn kanji in vacuum, without the practical examples, you'll forget it fast)

4) meanings

As much as I loved "Remembering the Kana", I think "Remembering the Kanji" is not very good, at least as a main textbook. It doesn't have the stroke order and the list of meaning and readings is quite limited.

I don't think I really know a good kanji learning site, but if somebody could recommend something, I'd be grateful. Personally, I recommend getting a normal textbook and use it for self-study.

Hello everybody I'm Czarownica, which is Polish for "witch" and I want to learn languages... All the languages! Ok, maybe not all, but at least a few more. I'm fluent in English, my native tongue is Polish, I speak some Japanese (intermediate level, let's say, but that's probably being generous) and really basic Italian and German.

My dream is to become fluent in Japanese, learn Thai and maybe some other Asian language too. I also wish to improve my German.

My problem is that I'm really impatient, which is not good at all for language learners!

Nice to meet you all