Ariel

Spring~ When you're penning a novel or paper, you'll write many of these, You might have to join the military, even if that's not what you please

Watch! It illuminates the shadows And means easy to carry

I watched Switched at Birth and it was my first experience watching entire conversations in sign language, aside from interpreters. I was surprised at the amount of emotions they could convey through hand gestures without using their voice. It was also pretty fascinating to learn there was a whole, fleshed-out culture for the Deaf. Does anyone know sign language?

I think listening and reading are different experiences. For me, I can read French and have good comprehension of it, but I have a problem understanding someone if they speak it too fast. Inversely, for Japanese, I'm able to understand someone speaking well... but I have a problem reading Japanese text.

Well, it depends. With the advent of technology, you can type out kanji using roman letters and there are programs out there which will translate kanji for you. However, you can't do this on paper. Some publications will include furigana to help you read them, but some of them don't. I think you can get by without learning kanji, but if you wanted to work for a Japanese company and wanted to be equally considered as native speakers, you would need to learn kanji.

Homophones are words that sound the same, but have different meanings. Sometimes the spelling is different, and sometimes it's the same. In speaking, you can only tell what a person means by the context of their sentence Examples: Compliment = Praising someone/something Complement = Goes well with Flower = A fragrant, pretty plant Flour = Baking ingredient Vein = Blood vessels in the body Vain = Only cares about appearances Weak = Frail, delicate Week = Time period of 7 days Can anyone think of any more?

Another tricky use of the apostrophe/possessive that hasn't been mentioned yet is with who. Who's = who is Who's running the bake sale tomorrow? Whose = possessive Whose car is this?

I'm not even sure if my first words even count because I think I was just spouting gibberish and some of the sounds I made were actually words. My mother told me my first word was "go" followed by "ma" and "blue." I totally want a kid whose first words are something crazy like "antidisestablishmentarianism" or something!

I think it's a fun way to learn new words and helps with pronunciation. Although I don't think it's too helpful for sentence structure because a lot of songs are composed of sentence fragments and phrases. I listened to a lot of J-Pop when I was learning Japanese and I am now able to translate the lyrics as a I listen to them. I've been trying to listen to K-Pop to get used to the pronunciation of Korean words and I think it's helpful. Has anyone used music to help them learn languages?

I think Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn if you aren't native because it's very different from most languages. Speaking: You have to train your ear to listen to the different pitches, because a word may be pronounced the same but its meaning is changed with the pitch. Writing: There are tens of thousands different characters and unlike Japanese, there is no furigana to help you sound out the word. The easy part is probably the grammar. There aren't any exceptions to conjugating verbs. (In English, to change a verb from present to past, we usually just add -ed to the end. But there are so many exceptions to this rule. Run -> ran, draw -> drew, read -> read, fly -> flew, etc.)

This sounds like a fun game. It rhymes with danger but is not always so dangerous So don't you have your mind set, before you've even met. A stranger? A word meaning window covering or oblivious, Somewhat more obvious: A person who cannot see."

Yes, definitely. Many languages have different nuances that non-native speakers may not even notice. A lot of asian languages are tonal. This means words are pronounced the same, but the meaning changes depending on the pitch. I've also heard some African languages incorporate tongue clicks into their words. Even with English, we raise the pitch of our last word when asking a question. I'm sure there are thousands of other aspects that I don't know about. I think it's incredibly interesting.

I like Google Translate for browsing websites. Google Chrome's even better because it automatically translates pages for you. I don't like using it to communicate with people because sometimes the message is completely different from what you intended. All my language teachers have told me Google Translate cannot compare to a human translator. Also note that the quality of the translation differs from language to language.

Has anyone tried My French Coach for the DS/Wii/PSP/iOS? I played it for half a year when I was learning French in high school and it really helped improve my vocabulary. It gauges your proficiency and gives you more difficult words the better you get. I also liked how they would re-use words that you used incorrectly in the past to help you learn better. There are about a dozen mini games you can unlock, so there's a lot of variety. And apparently the dictionary has about 10,000 words.

I downloaded this app a month ago, and it's a fun way to pass the time. Sometimes I show my friends and we take turns trying to guess the word. I would only recommend this game to advanced English speakers because some of the pictures are really obscure. Even with English as my native language, as you said, some levels are pretty tricky. There is a hint system, but they are hard to get. 20-30 games for one hint, or spend real cash.