ssonicblue

I haven't paid for it yet, but based on what I've seen of it from the basic version, I may ask for an upgrade for my birthday in a few months. It looks quite useful!

I study Chinese because, even as an American, Chinese culture has had a huge impact on my life. I first read the Dao De Jing when I was in high school, and it spoke to me as no other philosophy book had before. The message of knowing how to live life in order to make living life easy is just incredibly wise, and to this day I am motivated to learn Chinese in the hopes of one day being able to read that book in its original language. Then, when I got to college, I found my college's 武术(wu2shu4) team. I fell in love with the art, and it became the primary influence on how I spent my time. I hope to go to China in a few years, and if I'm lucky, maybe I'll find a job that allows me to spend time there regularly.

Oh, cakewalks! Funny story about that one, at least as far as I understand it. Cakewalks in the modern day are 'competitions' at county fairs and the like. The people running the cakewalk buys a bunch of cakes and numbers them. People pay into the pot for a spot in line, and then they walk in a circle for a set amount of time, around a ring of numbers written on the ground. When the music stops or someone shouts 'stop,' everyone stops on the number closest to them, and then the person running the cakewalk gives out cakes to people standing on the matching numbers. So, as I understand it, a cakewalk is just a competition that's exceptionally easy to win.

What Writeletters said. Google Translate should really be called "Google Interlanguage Dictionary." It's not really a live translator and it's terrible at things like dialects, parlance, and nuance in any language. The instances where it does manage to catch secondary meanings or contextual implications are usually added to the system manually by Google's engineers. In the future, we may eventually see an actual universal translator... but GTranslate isn't there yet.

I'm currently studying Standard Mandarin Chinese, but when I feel I've learned a sufficient amount of that, I'm very interested in picking up Arabic. I attend a university with a large Arabic-speaking population, so I'm exposed to it regularly, and I think it sounds (and looks, my god, Arabic script is gorgeous) absolutely beautiful. I might end up going further into the Asian peninsula, though--Korean is very interesting and its writing system is fascinating, and Japanese is also beautiful and earns you a lot of geek cred.

Linguaholic, that's awesome! I'd like to eventually be employed as an interpreter, or at least do something that allows me to travel frequently. Pandandesign: yeah, Mandarin/Standard Simplified currently, though I'm getting a lot of Cantonese/Traditional experience playing Sleeping Dogs... Eventually I'm interested in learning Cantonese as well, but that's a seriously big 'eventual.'

That's... really cool! It's interesting how Chinese uses sentence structure to put focus on different parts of the sentence, like with the 是...的 structure and the focus it puts on 'how something happened.' Thanks linguaholic! I'm going to use this to surprise 我的老师 next semester...

I was reading an article on how to "bridge the gap between classroom learning and actual speaking," with testimonies from several prominent folks about their experiences. One of them was a guy who apparently got so fed up with the low quality of such programs that he decided to create his own website: http://www.fluentU.com/ . I decided to give it a shot, and to my surprise, it's pretty great! The memorization scheme doesn't have you using flashcards, filling in sentences, or anything like that--instead, you just watch videos of native Chinese speakers, with subtitles in English and either simplified or traditional hanzi, and try to focus on learning what the words sound like and how they're used. Give it a shot, it's a lot of fun!

Hi everyone! I'm Andrew, I'm a university student with a substantial interest in language learning. I'm currently studying Chinese, with an aim to visit China in a year or two. It's an especially difficult language to learn, so I was excited to find a forum dedicated to people learning any language. Nice to meet you!