jaray87

I agree with reading the sentence out loud to detect run-ons. Being in a fast world and everything needing to be 'efficient', whenever I compose a sentence, I always ask myself if there is a shorter or more concise way of writing what I have to say. That way, when all sentences are short, you have less chance of a run-on sentence forming. Hope this helps.

I think the major benefit of learning a language is being to communicate, ie. speak with a native person. Reading and writing are good to have as well, but speaking in another language, I see as the main goal in learning language. That being said, I don't think memorizing will help the speaking part at all. I am still trying to find the holy grail to 'memorizing' the Chinese intonations for the thousands of characters out there - and a lot of the pinyins are the same!!

I suppose we first have to define what valuable means to us before we can definitively pinpoint which language is the best to learn. For me, I am learning Mandarin because I have always wanted to live in China - I find the vast land and the billion people fascinate me. Sure, there are all the stereotypes of Chinese people that annoy me but I bet you that the majority of the people outside the major cities are amazing people to get to know and to see how they live. So the 'value' for me to learn Chinese is having access to many people to learn from - ie. the Chinese culture and way of life.