Gelsemium

Ahah, poor as a church mouse is a good one lol, sadly we have a lot of church mouses in our world...

I love the expression "Raining cats and dogs" - that basically means to be raining a lot.

Thanks for sharing this Baburra, it's the first time I hear this idiom and I do love to learn new things. So "I am beside myself with anger" basically means that I was very angry? This sounds rather colloquial though.

I haven't tried any of those, but if I was still a student I would definitely go to an Erasmus program. I work at a university and we receive loads of those students and I envy them, they are learning languages and gaining a big life experience.

I agree with what you say fortuna, the best best sources are the ones that make you comfortable of the ones you can afford or have time with. In my case I would go to a language school if I had the time and money because I think it's the easier way to learn, with a teacher.

I would love to know all the languages in the world, but I guess I'd love to master the ones I have knowledges first. If I had to pick five I'd go for Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, seems a life-long project though... 

That is so true Ana Moise, when I am reading a book it's like I enter a different world, I can imagine everything that is happening and apart from being culturally enriching it's also an escape from our day-to-day worries.

Sometimes it's easier said than done 003, if we are not in a country where the language we are learning is spoken we really can't expose ourselves easily. We can look for schools or communities or even activities where that language is spoken though.

LOL, pretty amusing quiz, let me tell you that if you don't have 100% on this you will never have another 100% opportunity because it's a really easy one!  :grin:

Do you look week?  :grin:

I agree that it's optimal to learn one language at once because in that way we just don't mix things and we get to organize that language correctly inside our head. Having this said, we all know that it's common practice in mandatory school to learn several languages at the same time.

Hey there gabriela, welcome to the forum! You say you're still stuck in the Philippines, I understand you are eager to move to another place? Howcome?

I hope you enjoy it here, the best language forum ever! 

I've always heard that imagination is seeing, so great that we can imagine what we read, it just means we are enjoying it and we are fully seeing it. If we are not having such joy, maybe we should just switch book?

I think we all make up words, it's just convenient and it's really fashionable to do it these days, especially singers and show business people are making up words all the time.

One point is that if you're taught since you were a kid, hard was made easy because kids are learning machines.

As for being hard and easy, sure there are, we just can't compare English grammar to German or Japanese for example!

I really couldn't care less about how other people speak, whether they use internet terms or not. I hear those terms that were mentioned here all the time, and I'm not affected at all when I hear it. Live and let live.

LOL, yeah, it's just the way language evolves, it absorbs everything around it, the essence of the times we are living and if we are living in a high tech period it's just natural that the languages reflect that.

I agree that knowing multiple languages is valuable, but at the same time we need to be lucky to put them to use at our benefit at a professional level. More and more people have realized how useful languages are and there is more offer than demand currently.

I think that learning at school in an integrated educational environment is way better because we can learn from the teacher and interact with the colleagues, I think this is far easier than learning alone. I've studied at school.

I just read a post from g2narat saying she was in the country and that she learned the language in two months, so I guess that says it all, it makes a huge difference because we are learning 24 by 24 and not just a couple of hours per day.

Two months is a really short period of time g2narat, but it's like you say, you were in the country, so it was your life on the line. In that way is much faster, but if we are doing it without urgency it takes way longer.

I have a good sense of humor, so if someone laughs of my accent or because I said something wrong most likely I will laugh along, considering that after they will teach me the correct way of saying it...  :pirate:

I am Portuguese and I think that when we speak English we don't have a strong accent. I mean, in my case some works I say them using the British accent and others the American one, so it's probably a mess lol!

I agree, not only speaking is the hardest for me too, as it's also what we forget faster. A few years ago I tried to speak French (I still had some in my head), but no word came out of my mouth, rather embarrassing!

That's just the way it goes, and you're now mentioning internet, but TV has the exact same effect as internet and other mainstream technologies affect the way we think and talk. So yes, the expression "Like" will be among us for a long time I think.

The most effective way to learn a new language is to be living in a country where that language is spoken an having a private teacher and dedicating at least 8 hours per day to it's study. I can't imagine a better way to do it.

I think that to pick up a new language it can take between one and two years if you're studying a couple of hours per day. If you are doing more hours that time can be cut half maybe, but it's a lot of work.

Thanks for the tip Linguetronix, I'm going to look her up. Listening to music is great to maintain our languages alive, also watching movies with subtitles is a good help.