Yorfs

Teachers can be brutal like that sometimes. *snigger* I had a teacher that so hated the word "ain't" she would take a wooden ruler and rap whoever said "ain't" on the head rather smartly with it. It stung pretty good too.

That was in the 70s. Now it's considered child abuse and we have armed guards in schools across the country. Funny ol' world...ain't it? LOL

Hah, first I read that you said "now we have arm guards", as in to protect your fingers from the ruler. Now that'd be something 

I've read my fair share of disney's comics in foreign languages. Even if I might not completely understand everything, the pictures help and I kind of learn new words by accident.  Certainly a helpful tool, but not something I do often.

If you buy those pirated DVDs then you will see most of the translation are either wrong or completely messed up (the words in a sentence are not in order) so yes I have noticed a lot. It can really be annoying especially for the person who is relying on the subtitles to understand a movie.

Similiar effect if you turn on video captions on YouTube. Turns any video into un-intended comedy

I find it interesting that they'd offer German in a non-european school, but it certainly isn't a bad thing. They offer it here starting from 8th grade I believe? Not many people take it, but it's nice to have the option. There are also some short few week courses for spanish and maybe italian too and the selection gets better in high school.

I was interested in the Elvish (Elven?) language from Lord of the rings because I remember reading that it was loosely based on finnish. I learned a few phrases, like how to say hello and how to pronounce certain sounds, but nothing more than that. This was years ago, so don't come chatting me in Legolas

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? It chuck all the wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

Childhood traumas. On our 6th grade english class, our teacher made us repeat that sentence out loud one by one. Nobody got it right, and she didn't reveal until the very end that it was a tongue twister, not an actual phrase we'd ever need.

This is odd, I was just practicing my cursive writing last night. I am twenty now, and I vividly remember the booklets and homework I used to work on. I can only imagine the future generations trying to decipher a historical document written in cursive writing. It would be like trying to read an unknown language. Seriously,if not practical, it is at least relaxing - focusing on achieving an elegant writing style makes me forget my troubles.

I think cursive writing can be seen as a form of art in the hands of a skilled person, no doubt about that. I've also spent my fair amount of time admiring people's work writing with chinese sumi-e ink. Very relaxing and intriguing to watch.

Yeah it's so odd. Everybody no matter where they are from always has the same story. Was told to learn cursive in elementary school, never used it since. It has this kind of vibe to it, that it's respected almost as like cultural heritage. "We had to learn it, so must you". Everybody knows it serves no purpose in today's world, yet insist in teaching it.

I really don't see the reason to have cursive writing at all, and i hope that it's removed from the curriculum alltogether. The teachers should focus more on getting the kids to write in their own way, but in a way that people can actually read what they have written. It's much better if they spend time on teaching the kids how to write things that are readable, than to teach them how to write cursive.

Truths! Also removing cursive would open up a lot of time for say creative writing or other linguistic studies.

Mandatory longest usable finnish word in existance:

"järjestelmällistämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän".

There are a few longer ones, but the other one I know is somehow related to the jet engines of a fighter plane or some other mechanical terminology, so that doesn't really count

Also: "Kas vain!" sanoi kasvain, ja kasvoi vain. Vain kasvain voi kasvaa noin vain."

Hi there, another newbie here!

I'm a 25 year old guy from northern Finland. My native tongue is finnish, but by law I guess my second native tongue is swedish although my skills in english are far superior. I've also recently started learning some german, but mainly for entertainment purposes. Hoping to enroll on either german or russian basic course next fall if one is offered in my university. I'm here to try to collect tips and resources for language learning and teaching in general, for I am currently doing my bachelors and masters degree in education and hoping to do english language as my second minor, giving me qualifications to teach it in schools.

Most of the time the subtitles are not accurate at all, and it's a shame. The writers put a lot of effort into the dialogue, but it can sometimes be impossible to translate everything in such small place and still keep the original thought behind it. I've helped a friend a few tmes translating english puns into finnish fan made subtitles, and believe me, it's not easy.

Sorry for posting to an older thread, but as a classroom teacher (to be) I find this topic interesting. In my country cursive has been taught starting from second grade. When I was in elementary school we'd have to use cursive in all our assignments up until 9th grade. Once you hit high school you didn't have to anymore, so most people chose not to.

Now, the curriculum for elementary schools changes every few years, and the letters and cursive rules have in just past 10 years changed drastically from the way I was taught. Cursive doesn't even look like cursive anymore, there are no fancy loops or binding all the letters. The modern rules are very weird and cursive looks like just regular hand writing, and certain letters don't bind together at all. The new curriculum will be taken into action in 2016, and by the looks of it they are going to change the cursive rules again. There's even big talk about removing it completely, which I kind of agree with. It can be very confusing for younger children to learn four sets of each letter and then all these rules of binding and whatnots. Who does it benefit to learn cursive when really there will be no use for the skill in later life and even teachers and other adults don't like using it? I think one arguement is that cursive looks ( or can look) pretty, but if we get rid of cursive kids could pay more attention to their handwriting in non-cursive, which can still look really good. This will also give them more practice in forming their own personal hand writing.

Actually, I think that I would say that it is quite the opposite. I think that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn. There are a lot of different rules in English that make learning the language hard. In addition to that, there are also a lot of words that have different spellings and different meanings like to/two or their/there, etc.

I agree to a certain extent. If for whatever reason english wasn't in such a dominant position in terms of languages, I think it could be a fairly difficult language to learn. We are bombarded with english constantly, so that makes the learning a bit easier. There are pretty straight forward rules in the language, but also many exceptions and exceptions to those..exceptions. English is a pretty easy language to get the basics of, but mastering it and learning all the grammar rules by book could be very difficult.

I've been studying english ever since third grade. Now I'm married to a native speaker and thinking of getting the qualifications of teaching english in middle/high-schools, so I guess you could say that english has been and most likely will be a pretty big part of my education Although I'm still horrible at written english I think I'm pretty fluent with spoken language.

UPDATE!! the app is called ROSETTA COURSE!!!! I am so so sorry for the mix up!! this app is completely free!!

Is this a fairly new app? I was able to find it on iTunes, but sadly it doesn't seem to be available on Windows phone.

My German vocab is still very limited, but one of my favourites has to be good ol' "Kugelschreiber", ballpoint pen. It just sounds so..german and I get great satisfaction in saying the word out loud