rgaz83

If you hate capitalization, do not EVER learn German. Ever. If you only have one, hand, I can see capitals being "too much effort". Otherwise, punctuation isn't enough. There are many fonts where you have to squint to see whether a comma was used, or a period. You talk about wasted effort? That is wasted effort for me, your reader. To me, not capitalizing things says that you're too lazy and selfish to care about anyone else but you. And I'm done with this thread.

That doesn't sound correct at all. While I'll agree that "have had" is perfectly acceptable English, I think it is wrong at this time. Instead of: I think it would be better if the response was "Yes, I did. I always have a pen in my pocket, and I definitely had the pen in my pocket at the time of the murder." You could also say "Yes, I had one. I always have a pen in my pocket; I certainly had the pen in my pocket at the time of the murder." The sentence as written sort of implies that there were multiple murders and you had the pen in your pocket for ONE of them, but not the others. At least, that's the vibe I'm getting as a native English speaker.

It really depends on where you are and what languages you know. One of my old Spanish teachers also spoke Russian. Not many people living around here speak Russian. So, during summers, he would get a job as a translator for any Russian tourists or whatever; I think he actually worked for an embassy? I don't remember. There was just enough work that he made pretty good money with it. I THINK he could've lived off just that, but he liked teaching, but it's been years so I don't remember exactly. There are plenty of online translation jobs, if you're fluent. Again, it depends on what languages you speak. And I think you'll find that if you look around... there are a lot more jobs requiring bi/tri/etc-lingualism than you might believe.

I also agree that the hardest part about learning a new language is the vocabulary. Until you get a sufficient amount of vocabulary under your belt, it's tedious to try to find something you WANT to read in another language. But you can't get more vocabulary if you don't read anything. It's a rather large catch-22. I find that simply trying to memorize vocabulary lists is boring and incredibly inefficient. I've never been able to stick with anything that way.

I don't mean a translation of a book into Spanish, I mean something originally written in Spanish to begin with. So what is it, who wrote it and what's it about?

In order to develop for iPhone, you MUST own an Apple computer. This makes it an expensive proposition for people who are just making apps as a hobby or who aren't making much money from their apps. On the other hand, Android is free and you don't need anything especially expensive to develop it. A Droid phone costs $30-50 if you want something to test it on. And the app isn't Ihola!, it's !Hola!, with the upside-down question mark that's used in Spanish.

I downloaded a version of this a long time ago and wasn't impressed. It looks like they've improved it quite a bit since then and it might be worth me checking it out again.

I've never really thought languages sound the same, except marginally so. Even though I can't speak them myself, I can typically tell what language a person is speaking without asking them. Or at least I can place what area of the world they're from. I'm not so sure that my ear is so nuanced as to be able to tell Cantonese from Mandarin, but Japanese sounds totally different from those as does Korean. Spanish, Italian, French, German & Russian are all relatively simple to distinguish. I'm not familiar enough with African and Indian languages to be able to tell which language/dialect is being spoken, but I could probably make a decent guess. Each language tends to have its own rhythm, aside from the sounds, that helps separate it out from the others.

I know there's a thread on the hardest language you've ever learned, but what was the easiest? And what language(s) did you know at the time? As for myself, I'm still working on it so I have no harder OR easier languages at the moment.

I think workbooks can be useful, for some people. But it greatly depends on the workbook as well. I've seen some really terrible workbooks, and some that look quite useful.

Thanks! This is incredibly useful. I don't think I've ever seen ir a/voy a before for sure. I'm pretty sure everything says to use "voy a". Same with "coger". This kind of thing is incredibly frustrating.

I'm nowhere near having children, and I'm not sure if I ever will. But if I did, I'd certainly want to teach them more than just English. For a variety of reasons, I'd probably want them to learn Mandarin and Spanish. Other languages would come later.

I probably should, but I rarely watch TV in English so that makes it more difficult to make time to watch things in other languages. I'm sure it's a great way to learn, though!

A lot of Spanish resources seem to assume that you'll be visiting Spain and want to learn Castellian Spanish. I, on the other hand, want to learn Mexican Spanish. I know they're not terribly different, but I know that they're also not the same, akin to British and American English. Does anybody know of any definite list(s) of differences between the two? I'm not talking about slang, exactly, but differences in standard vocabulary and pronunciation.

I have found Pimsleur to be not all that great. It's okay in addition to other things, but it's very poor on it's own; especially with the expensive price, though you can at least check out Pimsleur from your local library sometimes. It does, at least, have an advantage over just plain workbooks in that you're actually listening to the language and developing a more or less proper accent right from the start. A book can't really do that.

If you're interested in sign language, this guy has some beautiful videos of songs, done in ASL: http://www.youtube.com/user/CaptainValor/videos The nice thing about his videos is that not only do the captions display the lyrics, but what he's actually signing as well. Some of it's extremely different! I find it quite interesting to watch his videos, too bad he doesn't make them any longer.

I've tried a demo/limited version of Rosetta Stone for a couple languages, back when they were still doing that (not sure they still do that at all). I wasn't really impressed. If it were less expensive, it would be a great resource in addition to other ways to learn a language. As-is, there are better methods, most of which are free. Rosetta Stone has changed since then, but it's still essentially the same program. I find this to be a fairly accurate review, unlike the "reviews" that are trying to sell you the program: http://www.fluentin3months.com/rosetta-stone-review/

The term you're looking for may be "portmanteau".

I have a bunch of Spanish textbooks, but unfortunately none of them will teach anything simply by sitting there, lol. I need to find more things to read that are entirely in Spanish, for immersion purposes, but it's hard to find something that's interesting enough for me to struggle through, without speaking Spanish in the first place.

Being American, I have to say I like to listen to British accents the most. I'm not sure which one I prefer, exactly. After that, it's Australian and then probably Scottish in terms of which are favorites. It's hard to choose, though, since I find all accents fascinating. My least favorite accent(s) are anybody who has moved to Canada from another country. I don't know why, since I don't really perceive Canadians as having a strong accent most of the time, but have a really hard time understanding that mix!

Spanish would be extremely useful for me, were I actually fluent. You can get jobs more easily and the pay can be at least a little higher as well. I live in a predominantly Hispanic area (though mostly relatively affluent) and am always getting bilingual or just Spanish flyers and whatnot posted on my door as a result.

Spanish spelling is extremely regular, with a handful of what seem like exceptions. I can't recall what they are, exactly, but the words just aren't spelled how I think they should be, based on how they sound. It probably has to do with the specific accent(s) used, too. But I also agree that immersion is going to get you speaking faster than anything else. One thing I've read but haven't tried myself is to keep a word journal. Every time you come across a word you don't know but would like to, whether in English or Spanish if you're listening to something in Spanish, you write it down. At the end of the day, you get a dictionary and look up all the words you didn't know for the day. Eventually, you'll get to where you're looking up very few words but you'll have a large vocabulary without memorizing irrelevant vocabulary words and sentences like "where can I get a horse and carriage this evening?"

One resource I've just discovered for learning Spanish is http://www.freerice.com Not only do you earn rice for those in poverty, they have a nice Spanish vocabulary flash card system set up there. They also have German, Italian, French and Latin. I find this slightly more motivational than other vocabulary flash card sites/games, even if the vocabulary can start to get tedious after a bit. The vocabulary is a little bit limited, but they'll probably add more words if more people use that part of the site. At least, I hope so.

I have an Italian friend who says that Spanish is fairly close to Italian, as Romance languages tend to be. French, although a Romance language, has quite a few differences. I don't remember where it is, but there used to be a site/page that showed approximate percentage similarities between various languages to help you decide which language would be "easiest" for you to learn next. I thought it was at Omniglot, but apparently not or else they've removed the page. I'm not sure how accurate it was, exactly, but it was still interesting. From what I recall, Italian and Spanish were something like 75-80% similar to each other, while French was something like 65-75% similar to the other two. English was like 45-60% to each of French, Spanish, Italian and German.

My reasoning for learning Spanish isn't all that altruistic. There are a lot of native Spanish speakers around here, and it's much easier to get a job if you are bilingual. Not only that, but the jobs tend to pay more when you're bilingual. It's usually somewhere between $1-2/hour more, which can really add up. So, Spanish is for mainly financial reasons. It's OTHER languages that I want to learn for fun! :grin: