Gelsemium

For some reason I'd love to learn Italian. I have no roots there and I'm not planning on going there, but I think it's a fascinating language. Maybe some day I'll dive into Italian.

A paper dictionary it's losing alot of it's meaning especially when even in the libraries everyone has a tablet or a smartphone, it would be interesting to see a statistic of sold dictionaries recently.

We can imagine it to be any language, but I don't think our manking would have the ability to agree on an universal language, we are killing our planet and we don't even agree on stop doing it.

I prefer subtitles anytime, I can't stand any show where I can't listen to the original voices, it's sounds totally strange to me and I prefer not to watch it to be honest.

I think that one of the best reasons to learn a language is to speak the language of the person we love. Have you done it? Would you do it?

Not really no. I was once interested in learning Latvian because I knew this fascinating Latvian girl, but those days are long gone now lol and unfortunately I never get to learn Latvian! :grin:

I was watching a TV show the other day and an English teacher was telling the difficulties he had teaching Shakespeare. So he decided to make songs where the lyrics the key-points of Shakespeare. The students loved it and actually learned it! How do you see this?

Music is a great way to learn languages and anything else. Just recently I saw a TV show where an English teacher was teaching Shakespeare trough some songs he recorded, pretty remarkable.

I agree sputnik. For me it's equivalent to asking, is history useful? Sure, the past might be useful for nothing, but might as well be useful for us to learn from where we came from and from our mistakes, to build a better future.

I think it's impossible to artificially introduce a global language, it's a failed project as seen. Governments already have a difficult determining what their population will be taught and a language that no one uses is not on that list.

I don't agree that the languages are being killed, that is not true. People who use computers communicate more in English online and that's pretty much it, all the other people carry on with their normal lives...

I text the regular old fashioned way, I type the words and that's pretty much it. It's rare for me to type in English and in my language I never gained the habit of writing abbreviations.

Pretty much that Denis because babies can't be taught unless by the example, they don't have their rational capacity organized so that they can focus on one topic, they are just knowledge and behavior sponges.

I think that a global language already exists and it's called English and this was only possible by use and not by law. English will spread more and more I believe.

I don't know if it's a sad situation or not, for me the main goal is that people are able to communicate with each other, so if everyone is using English online, no problem by me. Sad just from the perspective of people that don't speak English.

Babies absorb anything around them, so if we want to teach them a foreign language nothing like start talking to him in a foreign language, he will learn faster than we can expect!

It seems a pretty complete site, I'm going to check it out, thanks for sharing the link! Wow, almost 20 languages available, it's a really professional site...

There is a clear example of how watching movies help. Spanish see their movies in Spanish and therefore they have more difficulties with English, it's like their tongue doesn't bend correctly! :nerd:

It depends on how fast you want to learn. If you are the casual learner browse the net for free contents. If you're in a rush to learn it some intensive school is the best option, there are schools with daily classes where we can learn really fast.

I think it's really good and that most of us does that. I am not so certain about having the subtitles or not; if we don't there are some parts we might not understand, if we do, we might just get lazy and forget the whole purpose of it.

Learning with lyrics is a great way to pick up some words, but it doesn't teach us a language. My GF loves to be in the car listening to a CD and reading the lyrics (while I am driving of course) and she does pick up some words.

Grammar is very important because it determines if you're speaking correctly or not. If I was speaking incorrectly I would love that people point that out to me or else I'll just keep making the same mistake.

Why isn't your boyfriend teaching you? That doesn't make much sense does it, I think he will be interested in teaching you, in sharing something he has with the one he loves. If he doesn't want to teach you what's the point in learning?

When your native language is not English learning it seems something pretty obvious. I didn't made my decision, learning English is something mandatory where I live.

I can't really recall when I started to learn English, that was my second language. I was probably around seven, as it was mandatory to learn from that age on. I think I studied English at school up to the 10th grade (10 years total) and then one more year at the university, that was optional. I hated it though, lousy teacher! :bored: