polybus

There are so many false friends between English and French due to the history of borrowings between the two languages. One that still confuses me from time to time is "assister" which most of the time means "to attend, to go to" in English. And of course "attendre" is not to attend but "to wait" And with the new movie adaptation of Les Misérables: "misérable" in French means "destitute, shabby" and not "sad, depressed" like it does on English.

My favorite things about the Spanish language are: 1. The pronunciation is easy and clear. Compared to many other languages, how a Spanish word is written is basically how it is pronounced. Of course there are accent differences, but you never have to look up the meaning of a word, and then the pronunciation of the word, like you have to in many other languages (English, French, Chinese, Japanese etc.) 2. Spanish is a very widely spoken language. I love that Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Chile and Spain all speak the same language. This makes it a hugely useful language for travel, and travel is the main reason I like to learn other languages.

It is definitely important to be aware of curse words when you learn English, in some contexts they are quite common and you need to be aware of them. I would suggest you hold off using them yourself though, unless you have a fantastic grip on exactly when it is okay to use them. Inappropriate use of English curse words is widespread and just because you are used to hearing a swear word in some contexts does not mean it is okay in other contexts. An example of this is the widespread use of the English f-word in Quebec, even on TV shows and from children. Even though words like that are common in English, they are still jarring and extremely inappropriate to a native English speaker in the wrong context.

Hello everyone on linguaholic! I was born and raised in Canada and still live here. I have lived abroad on several occasions, including a year in Taiwan and 4 months in Saudi Arabia. I love to learn languages, but I do not use them in my work and it is mostly just a hobby at this point. I love traveling, and trying to speak another language while traveling enhances the experience for me. Nice to meet all of you and good luck to everyone in your language learning adventures!

I am not actively studying Dutch right now, just too busy. I have family in the Netherlands though. I have done some basic courses and know the absolute basics. I want to brush up before I go back to the Netherlands to visit. Unfortunately I don't have any immediate plans to travel any time soon.

I have lived abroad a few times now. The biggest and most important one was a year living in Taiwan teaching English and learning Chinese. I have also lived in Saudi Arabia, England and the U.S. (I'm from Canada). Language and culture issues were the toughest in Taiwan and Saudi Arabia of course. The language barrier was toughest in Taiwan at the beginning, but of course that's why I was there so I learned as quickly as I could.

Once you have studied a language to an advanced level and you are more or less happy with your abilities, what do you do to maintain that level in the long term. Sometimes I feel that languages I have not used in a while are getting rusty and I am forgetting things.

The easiest language that I have learned was Spanish. This might partly be because it was the first foreign language that I really tried to learn. Spanish has a very easy pronunciation for an English speaker, certainly much easier than French or Chinese. Spanish grammar can be difficult at times but if you don't stress about it and try to get everything perfect from the start, I think it is not really that bad.

The first time you are asked a question in the language you are studying and you answer right away, in the language, without thinking about it first or translating in your head. That is a great moment. You probably didn't even notice when you did it, but when you think about it later it is a big accomplishment. Learning another language can be difficult, it is great to focus on these positive moments of achievement.

Although I am from Canada, I have a harder time understanding Quebec French than European French. This is mostly just exposure; I have ironically been more exposed to the French of France. I am okay with the "clicky" parts of Quebec French (the palatalization of ti and di sounds) but when it is spoken quickly I sometimes have a hard time catching all of it.

I learned Spanish mostly on my own with resources from the internet and books that I purchased. When I was getting a little better I found a couple pen pals from Spain that I emailed back and forth for for a while. They would correct my mistakes in Spanish and I found that very helpful. As for speaking and pronunciation, I have had the opportunity to travel to several Spanish speaking countries and while there I try to speak Spanish as much as possible.

Movies are a great source of listening practice and new vocabulary for me. The problem is if I want to enjoy the movie then I like to turn the subtitles on so that I can follow the movie, but if the subtitles are in English then I can't help but look at them and then I don't pay enough attention to the target language. If I leave subtitles off then it is better listening practice, but if I don't know the language well enough I miss some of the plot. If I have lots of time I watch the movie once with subtitles and then once or more without.

All of the languages that I know I studied on my own. By this I mean that I did not have a real teacher at any time. But you still need lots of help from native speakers and in that way you never learn completely on your own. When I was learning Chinese I used to participate in a lot of language exchanges. The people I talked to were not my teachers, but they still taught me a great deal.

Ever since I returned to Canada from Taiwan, I can't say that Chinese is particularly "useful" in my life. I do not use it in my business and I do not need to use it to speak to anybody that I know. But it is still fun. I try to use it as much as I can and have made new friends this way, but I do wish it was a bit more useful to me day-to-day.

When I was learning Chinese very seriously I spent at least 2 hours a day studying. I was also living in Taiwan at the time so even when I wasn't actively studying I was still using the language. Learning the characters are the most time consuming part. It really takes a long time to learn to read Chinese. Even Chinese children take many years of school just to learn to read. So if you want to learn to read Chinese you really have to put in the time - no shortcuts I'm afraid.

Mandarin is definitely the one to go with. Ask any Cantonese person! Cantonese is a fun and interesting language and I wish I knew it better, but it is not comparable to Mandarin in terms of usefulness.

I honestly think that an extreme method like this is what it would take to learn a difficult language on your own from home. If you can travel to another country and spend a decent amount of time there, then you should do that. I learned Chinese by living in Taiwan. But if you cannot afford to or do not have the time to do this, then you probably need to do something extreme like this. Otherwise it is too easy to plateau and lose focus.

I am expecting a child soon and I have been thinking about this a lot. I am very interested in languages and can speak a few of them well enough, but my native language is English and so is my wife's. I would love to teach my child a language, but I am wondering if this is realistic or even possible given that everyone in the child's life will be English speaking. For now we have settled on exposing our child to different languages and nurture any interests they might have. Forcing them to learn a language somewhat artificially might be even worse.

I don't know if German sounds "agressive", but I would say to a lot of English speakers it does sound rough. This is partly because of the guttural sounds but I do think it is partly because of negative associations with hearing German, such as movies with Nazi speeches. I doubt they would feel quite the same way if we were more used to hearing Miss Germany contestants answer questions for example.

The children's books or Harry Potter books are good suggestions, but if you are like me you can't read more than a few pages of these just because they do not interest you. What I did was bought some John Grisham books in Spanish. His books keep you interested and are very dialog driven. They are not difficult reads after the first chapter or so, and you are reading real, adult fiction that Spanish speaking adults would read. It's a huge motivation.

I tried Rosetta Stone several years ago. I thought it was kind of fun but it was very expensive and I didn't see how you could actually learn a language with their system. One of their commercials has a non-Asian woman speaking in Mandarin. I can understand and actually her Mandarin is quite good - hard to believe she learned that clicking on pictures of boys and girls on picnic tables. I have heard that the new program is a lot better and does a better job teaching the language. It is too expensive for me to try though.

Music can be a fun way to learn for me and I feel like I am getting practice even if I am not working too hard at it. I don't feel like it is enough to actually learn the language though. I am always skeptical when I hear people say they learned English by watch tv or movies. They must have done a lot more than just that right? If you like learning languages through music you should really check out http://www.lyricstraining.com/ if you haven't already seen it.

I think Google translate can be a useful tool, as long as you are translating into a language you know, and not into one that you are learning. That way you can ignore some of the mistakes, because you know the language, and focus on the other language. Also Google translate has become a great tool for me to type in another language. If I want to type something in Japanese or Greek or Russian I can use Google translate to do it. I find this awesome since I do not want to install all of these keyboards on my laptop.

My native language is English. Apart from that I know Spanish, French and Chinese. I also know a little bit of several others. I used to get started learning a language but then move on to another one before I got too far. So all together that is more than three. Although I know four languages to an advanced level, I don't always feel like I "know" all of these languages.

We didn't have any pen pals when I was learning French in school. Actually it seems to me like a good idea. I guess to the students it might just seem like more work sometimes, but any way you can try to engage the students that is probably for the best.