gegegeno

Re: cursing in Japanese, I studied in Osaka and speak colloquial Japanese with a slight Osakan accent, which is though of as unsophisticated by the far more cultured Tokyoites. Swearing in that accent can be particularly fun, though most of my interactions lately with Japanese people have required a little more politeness... In Japanese you don't "swear" so much as you speak impolitely with (it's hard to explain, but) a particular tone of voice that makes it clear. Politeness is a big deal in Japanese culture, so speaking in a way that isn't polite to someone you're meant to be more polite to is insulting in itself, but add the tone and there's no ambiguity. The dialects spoken in western Japan (incl. Kyoto, Osaka and [sorta] Hiroshima) are more expressive than the Tokyo (standard) dialect to begin with, so swearing in that accent is just that little bit more entertaining.

A few books come to mind for me, and these are the ones that really made me love a couple of my favourite authors: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was what got me into his works. It's a very compelling story and written in some incredibly beautiful prose. It combines different styles and is just overall an amazing book, and one I can't forget. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was similarly unforgettable for the way the author gets into the mind of Raskolnikov and really explores his psyche. I went through a lot of different feelings when reading that story, and feel even now that I "know" that character like an old friend. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward was also pretty memorable. I liked the clinical style of his prose and how it matched the clinical setting of a Russian cancer ward. Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and actually spent time being treated in a cancer ward, from where he gained the source material. There are more (honourable mention to Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected for being impossible to forget), but these are the ones that immediately came to mind as the ones I can never forget.

Well, I speak Australian English...we have a very "colourful" vocabulary. I guess that's what you get when the first generation of people in your country were all criminals! Finnish is also quite expressive with its swear words. I won't post anything here, but for those who are interested can check out the article about it on Wikipedia (probably NSFW). The last entry is a word I heard a few times a day when I was in Finland last month.

The Old Testament was written almost entirely in Hebrew, and only a few short passages were in Aramaic. By the first century, few Jews still spoke Hebrew and Greek was the major language of Judea and its surrounds. The New Testament was hence written in a kind of Greek called Koine (the Greek spoken by the common people, and interestingly the Bible is one of few extent texts in Koine Greek). One source for this. Textual issues with respect to the Aramaic bible would therefore be in the translation to Aramaic from Hebrew or Greek. OP: It's kind of up to you what you want to do. Mounce's book on the basics of Biblical Greek is highly recommended, and I found it to be quite accessible. Hebrew is a harder language to learn and master due to a complicated grammar, but many people have succeeded before you. If it's worth it to you to know one or both of the Biblical languages, then go for it. I'm surprised your Bible college doesn't have any courses on them.

They're absurdly popular in Japan to the point where nearly everyone owns one. The price you pay has a lot to do with the quality of the dictionaries loaded onto it. Mine was top-of-the-line when I got it, and has the Japanese and Japanese<->English dictionaries that are generally considered to be the most accurate and comprehensive. A lot of learners of Japanese who've ever studied in the country get them for themselves (all my classmates had them too when I went on exchange). Given that the internet's best free dictionary between Japanese and English is quite comprehensive but has a lot of issues, and access to just one of the good ones costs nearly as much as an electronic dictionary filled with all of them, they represent really good value (thanks to deals done between manufacturers and the dictionary makers). But then outside of Japan and Japanese learners, I don't think they're too popular. I know that there are the ones that have 5-20 European languages loaded on them and are marketed to travellers, but I haven't really heard of ones for language learners like there used to be, since everything is online now.

This is a problem for me too. I studied most of my Japanese at university, so looming deadlines and exams kept me motivated to study the required material and keep on improving. Nowadays, I am motivated by a goal to become an interpreter and keep in touch with all my friends in Japan, but the lack of real deadlines and the like right now makes things difficult. I'm happy to read a book once I've started, but picking it up in the first place is often a challenge. I'm also studying Swedish, motivated by love (cue "naww"), but am yet to reach the point where it actually gets hard to keep going. The next time I'll have much of a chance to really use it will be probably next year some time, by which time I'll be back to full-time Japanese study, so here's hoping I can speak any Swedish by that point... To answer the question of the post: I try to remember why it is that I'm learning the language, and if there's an actual reason other than "I thought it would be cool", then it helps. It's why Japanese and Swedish are languages I've been able to continue with for longer than a few weeks, because I have good reasons for why I want to study them.

I decided to look up forte in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary [not to be confused the the Oxford Dictionary of English], a scholarly etymological/historical dictionary), and it has TWO etymologies! The noun forte, meaning a person's strong point, is from French but incorrectly spelled in a feminine form. The dictionary says this: The adjective forte, used in music for "loud" is from Italian "forte" meaning strong or loud. This is one you see a lot if you read sheet music (though it's often just denoted f.). Both versions come originally from the Latin fortis meaning strong. So everyone's right. It's from French, and Italian, and the French etymology is indeed weird ("ignorant" to use the OED's wording).

Go and meet some Finnish Swedes! You could always do what I did and "ota riski, rakastu suomenruotsalaiseen"! What's your own motivation for starting to learn the language again? I've always found that I can learn languages best when I have a good motivation to study. So with Swedish, having just come back from Sweden and Finland (where most of the people I met were my gf's friends and family who mostly speak Swedish) and planning a trip to go back next year in summer, I have the motivation of wanting to be able to understand conversations in Swedish and even participate in them, read all the books I bought and so on. If you already know some Swedish, my gf keeps recommending Stieg Larsson's books (especially "Män som hatar kvinnor" [English version is called "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"] and its sequels) for when I can read some more. Apparently the language isn't incredibly difficult and the story is quite compelling. I'll wait until I can at least read Moomin first though Good luck with the course, and keep us posted! This little subforum could use some more activity!

Actually AnkiDroid is a free app. I think it's fantastic and use it more often than on PC. It also synchronises with the PC version if you have an AnkiWeb account. The iOS app is paid, but is the official app, and fully supported, regularly updated, etc. The Android app is actually made by someone else and isn't supported by the maker of Anki. A couple of people I've studied with have paid for the iOS app, and they've all said it was worth it. It looks to be a little cleaner than the unofficial Android version. I can't remember the price off the top of my head, but I didn't think it was too much for such an excellent tool.

Hej! So I've not long come back from travelling to Finland and Sweden and am more motivated than ever to work hard at learning Swedish, so I can understand more of what's going on around me when I go there again. Lately I've been working on vocabulary and phrases using the site Memrise. Right now I'm just over halfway through the "Basic Swedish" course and will be moving on to the "3000 Most Common Swedish Words" course after that. I'm also working through the online textbook I posted in another thread. It's a bit old-fashioned but I'm getting some help from my Swedish-speaking girlfriend. My plan is to learn lots of vocab and enough grammar to be able to start reading. When I was in Sweden I bought a few easy novels (Pippi Långstrump and Moomin) and want to start on those asap! Anyway what is everyone else working on at the moment? What are your plans for learning Swedish?

I've been using it for like 4 years now. I highly recommend getting the "Japanese Support" plug-in and making your own cards with Japanese word (in kanji), reading (hiragana) and meaning. The shared decks like the Core decks are pretty good, but I've always found that the best decks for me have always been the ones I made for myself, with the words that I wanted to learn for myself (or had to learn for class). If you have the time to learn how to make them properly, the "cloze delete" cards are really cool. Thy give you a sentence with a word or particle missing (like わたしのなまえ_ゲゲゲノです) and you have to fill in the missing thing (in this case, the answer is は).

The screen on my old phone wasn't that big, and it was fine. Just the writing tests might be a little harder. It doesn't actually do handwriting recognition, so if you wanted to practice your kanji then you could write them on a piece of paper then check. Otherwise, unless your screen is tiny, the rest should work ok. Enjoy the app!

I actually got started with Japanese when I was in primary school - it's somewhat common in Australian schools (or at least the ones I attended) to have a language class as early as 4th or 5th grade. It was after learning a little Japanese that I got to know more about the culture and wanted to visit. After finally getting there (at the end of my first year in uni!) I met so many people and had such a great experience that I had no shortage of reasons to keep learning - to keep in touch with my new friends, to learn more about the culture and be ready to go back and experience even more! These days I'm motivated my a goal to become an interpreter. The ability level required is pretty high, so がんばらなきゃ!

If anyone's seen a Japanese newspaper or news web site lately, you'll notice the word 五輪 (gorin - "five rings") meaning "Olympics come up extremely regularly in reference to the Tokyo Olympics (or OK, sometimes Sochi too if you read the sports section). I'm not too surprised that it's been chosen as the Kanji of the year - it has no doubt jumped up a few places in the frequency rankings this year given how often it's coming up in the news.

English native here; my girlfriend is not a native speaker and I've spent a good amount of time living overseas. I think it's not always an issue of being uncomfortable with English, but there can be cultural differences too. The other day I noticed that my girlfriend can come across as a little rude when she answers questions, giving really short, one or two word answers to open-ended questions (which I might have expected a long answer to). I brought it up with her and we realized that in her culture it's weird to give long answers in most cases, as people tend to not talk much about themselves. It's noticeable, but I don't know that I've ever been deeply offended by them. Usually I find that direct personal questions are worse for me - older, totally unknown Japanese ladies asking when my girlfriend and I will "finally" marry is an example...

Linky Has anyone used this or any of the other FSI language learning courses? I've just started going through this with a native speaker who can help me with pronunciation and help me along in my practice in general. I thought this one could be good for me because (1) it's free and (2) it seems to focus a lot on speaking Swedish rather than reading and writing, much like I am. I think it might be a little old-fashioned in its approach (the first main chapter is just "learn all these greetings"), but hopefully it can help to improve my communication skills.

I'd like to know more about those links too. @rossonomus: You're in luck if you need to learn Swedish and Danish, as they're mutually intelligible languages with each other and Norwegian (though Norwegian-Swedish and Norwegian-Danish is easier than Swedish-Danish). I can absolutely agree that it's hard to maintain a language that you have little personal contact with, as I found with German, which I had to about A2 level before just stopping because I had no use for it. I'm lucky enough to have a Swedish-speaking girlfriend who can help me along a bit, and meeting her family and not understanding what anyone's saying at dinner has been a great motivator for me. It really drives home that motivation and discipline are so much more important than anything else when learning a new language.

Don't let the apparent difficulty of Japanese get in the way of you learning, if you want to learn this language! If you are motivated to learn (for whatever reason), you're going to be able to overcome any of the challenges to learning and even becoming fluent in any language. Japanese has 3 scripts, but two of those are able to be learned in a week or at most two if you put 20-30mins towards learning them every day, and will be reinforced when you see them in context. The third script, kanji (Chinese characters) takes longer but involves the same process of just learning them. Japanese has a lot of loanwords from English, so I'd say it wouldn't be long until you could order a kōhī (coffee) and a kēki (cake) in your favorite kafe (café). At least at the beginner to low-intermediate level, the grammar is quite easy to handle as there aren't a lot of exceptions to the rules of the grammar. So what I guess I'm saying is that although there might be more to learn when studying Japanese than, say, French or Swedish so it takes longer, it's not really "harder" than any other language you might want to learn. Just do it!

I'm a native of Australian English, which is spelled like British English, and have done some translation from my second language (Japanese) into English. Where it gets hard for an educated native is when you're used to the "rules" of one form and are expected to write according to the rules of the other form. So when I've done tests in American English I've had to change the way I both spell and punctuate my writing so that I could pass at a high level. The worst, really, for me is the correct way to punctuate around quotes, because whether you are supposed to put a comma or period inside or outside of the quotation marks depends on which English dialect you are working with. I'll admit that I'm totally confused by the difference - to the point that I now have to look it up even when working in my own native dialect - Australian English (I keep the official Australian Style Manual next to my computer at all times when I'm writing for school or work).

Oops, I should have subscribed to this topic before saying something so controversial! When I say it has a negative stigma, I mean that at least among my peer group (20-something university students and graduates), "lol" sounds like something used mainly by 12-year-olds on MSN and is something a lot of us want to distance ourselves from. Most of my friends prefer to use some variation of "haha" to indicate jokes, and somewhat rarely at that. That isn't to say it has a purely negative stigma in the rest of society, just maybe my peer group like to think we're above using the same internet slang we all used 10-15 years ago when we actually were 12-year-olds on MSN...

Well, language is always changing with time. Dictionaries aren't meant to be the gatekeepers of what is "real English", but to document the usage of words. "Computer" was a new word of the 20th century, but I doubt anyone was complaining about the death of the English language over that one being included in the Oxford Dictionary. If "selfie" is a new word of the 21st century, and is used regularly by speakers of English (which it is, at least by young people), then I believe that it qualifies for inclusion in English dictionaries.

As I am in Finland right now and staying with a Swedish-speaking Finn, so I feel a little qualified to answer this (after checking with her haha)! Danish, Norwegian and Swedish have a lot in common, and enough that they are considered to be mutually intelligible, i.e. people who speak one of those languages can understand what is being said in the others. Norway is geographically in between Sweden and Denmark, so it makes sense that Norwegians can speak to Swedes and Danes but Sweden and Denmark are a little further away so they find it a bit harder to understand each other (Swedish speakers say that Danes sound like they are speaking with a potato in their mouth, and speak too quickly; I'm sure Danes say that Swedes sound weird too). Finnish is a totally different language altogether. Finland, incidentally, isn't technically a part of Scandinavia either. There is a minority of Finnish people (about 5-6% of Finland's population) who speak Swedish natively and it is an official language in Finland, but the majority of people do not speak much Swedish (and probably speak better English, really).

Well I'm sure you've realized by now that it's not the easiest language to learn if you are an English native speaker. You'll have to learn a new alphabet (well, three of them), and Japanese grammar has nothing in common with English grammar at all. One area that might help you though is that Japanese has a lot of English loanwords - words that are originally from English but have been adopted into Japanese. So you might be likely to eat toosuto (toast) for breakfast while watching the nyuusu (news) on your terebi (short for terebishon - television). It's not like all of Japanese is English loanwords, but for most things that are either not native to Japan or have only been invented in the last 100 or so years, you might find that they have names that sound a lot like English.

Well in terms of flashcard software, Anki is probably the best around and is completely free for PC and Android (the iOS version isn't free but well worth the money). It uses a well-researched method of flashcard use called a Spaced Repetition System (SRS for short) which shows you your flashcards more or less often based on how well you know them. Memrise, iKnow and a lot of the other online flashcard sites use the same type of system, but Anki is far more customizable so it can fit your own personal learning habits and pace. That's important I think because the speed at which you learn new vocabulary when you're really new at a language is pretty slow but when you already know a lot of the language it's much easier to learn new words. You don't want to be going too fast when you begin and too slow later on, right? Quick warning: I've been using Anki for maybe 4 years now and I am probably very biased in its favor. I've recommended it to friends and classmates and they usually find it a little hard to get used to at the beginning, but after a week or two of using it they are quickly converted!

Hey, those are really cool! Particularly when you are just beginning to learn how to write kanji, these are extremely helpful to use. Actually, it's what they use in schools in Japan for the students to learn kanji! The grids help you to learn how to properly balance the characters so that it will look nice (and perhaps more importantly, easy to read) when you write them. Once you get the hang of these, I highly recommend that you use flashcards with the meaning of the kanji or, even better, words that use those kanji to practice writing them without looking at it and just copying. But still, getting to know the right way to get your kanji looking really nice is SUPER important if you want to be able to write Japanese.