宇崎ちゃん

13 hours ago, TeacherMichelleF said:

Yes, basically.

"suit of armour" is countable. You would wear a suit of armour but not an armour. It's like having a glass of water instead of a water or a piece of luggage instead of a luggae.

I agree that it sounds a little confusing.If a countable noun (suit, glass, piece) goes first then there's nothing in the sentence to tell you that the uncountable noun is uncountable. This can be a bit tricky, I agree.

I thought of "armour" as the suit itself already.
When I think of water, I'm thinking of the liquid, not the glass.
When I think of luggage, I think of the whole thing rather than it being in pieces.

Maybe that's where it went wrong?

1 hour ago, TeacherMichelleF said:

"Armour" is an uncountable noun and so doesn't need an article. Weapon is a countable noun, so it does need an article. For example, you could say "an apple" or "a song" but not "a water" or "a music" because water and music are uncountable. 

Does that make sense?

I didn't even notice the countable vs uncountable part!
Much like how "less" and "fewer" works right?

I actually thought that "armour" would be countable?
Of course you can only wear 1 at a time, but you can have a closet with a couple of them I suppose.

I always have suspicions towards short URLs, so I'll show what's underneath it to take away worries.

As for the video, north Chinese accent reminds me a lot to Korean with tones for some reason.
The south Chinese accent is how I often hear through announcements in intercoms, foreigners from China, and Chinese tourists.

5 hours ago, huangmao said:

Northern Chinese tend to speak in a way closer to standard mandarin, the southern parts of China got more different local dialects, such as Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Hunan dialect, and the famous Cantonese. There is an article talking about the basics of the Chinese language for beginners, check it out if you are interested.

Sounds a lot like west vs east Japan to me; east Japan is mostly standardised, while west Japan has a bunch of different local dialects.
And the funny thing is that north China (the standard dialect) has 北京 (north capital), while east Japan (the standard dialect) has 東京 (east capital).

One question: how does this relate to language learning?

You certainly got my attention.
Very cool drawing!

58 minutes ago, Don said:

I have noticed that among my younger colleagues the term "that been said" appears in their emails during explanations. The reason for this misuse is that they have misheard the expression and the usage is reinforced by their peers copying one another. That is, "being" sounds like "been" if it is not clearly enunciated.

It's a common trend worldwide for younger generation people to edit the language until it becomes the default.
And I have the feeling like if this has been the case throughout the history of human people.

Like in Japan in order to say "to eat", you had to say 食べる (taberu), but younger people made it into 食う (kuu) instead for casual speech only.
And nowadays this is a widely accepted way of saying the exact same word, and both words happily co-exist (because it's rare for Japan to remove something once it's already there).

Likewise, the phonetic sound "tu" (テゥ) is pretty new (so new, there's no single sillable for that sound specifically) and younger people have no problem to pronounce it at all, while elderly can't say nor hear it, so they'll hear and say it as "tsu" (ツ) instead.

Jetzt ich habe alles merged in one place.
Please don't make new topics about practically the identically same thing over and over again.

I'd say that Japanese art isn't as diverse as western art, but the quality is much higher.
But maybe that's to reflect one of the many differences; the west aims at continuous innovation while the east aims at stability.
It means that Japan always fall at least 1 generation behind, but at least it's safe and it's almost guaranteed to be good.
Meanwhile in the west you'd always be ahead of everyone else, but it's always a gamble on whether it's a ground breaking success, or the total destruction of everything you're involved in.

What is very diverse in my experience is the food, every area has its own local food.
All of them are worth a try, although you might not like it too much at first when you come from a European country, it took me a few months too before I got adjusted to the food here.
And then when I visited family last year, I was shocked that food in my own country that I used to love so much are no longer tasty.

But if you didn't visit Japan yet, I do recommend you come over for 2 weeks or so once the whole corona plandemic comes to an end on the 4th of November (American election day + 1).
Spend 1 week on traveling to the 10% of all the places where all the tourists go to, and then 1 week in the 90% of the places only locals ever get to see (because it's very different from the 10% that the whole world knows about), depending on your expectations you might love both faces of the country.

If you know a lot of vocabulary, and I assume you already know the characters, my advise is to read as much genuine Chinese text as possible.
You can try Baidu which is a kind of Chinese Yahoo.
Considering the nature of Chinese internet, you'd probably almost exclusively get search results in Chinese, so a lot of text you can encounter.

If you read enough, your brain will automatically rewire itself to make you understand Chinese grammar.
One thing to be aware however which I experienced when going from full time Dutch and Polish to full time English in the past, and again when going from full time English to full time Japanese in the current time, you might lose your sense of grammar in the languages you don't practise too often.
Yes, this includes your native language(s)!

Welcome.

I can speak both, best of luck with your goal.
I know from experience, if you're in Europe Japanese seems to be a useless language that would get you nowhere, but here in Japan people who can speak both English and Japanese fluently are in extreme demand.
Especially with Tokyo Olympics 2020+1 coming up, and the constantly raising numbers of tourists from all over the world until the political common cold I mean coup attempt against Donald Trump I mean corona virus came in.

Welcome to the language club.
With the exception to English, I unfortunately don't speak any of the languages you know. (；´∀｀)

2 hours ago, ShingTsui said:

Can we create a discord channel or such for small groups learning languages?

Yea, I WONDER if there's already one? HMMMM!!

I tried to do the survey, but I came across rather very strange questions like:

I went to 4 pages of questions, and literally nothing had anything to do with language learning.
Instead, all I can see is identity politics.
So I stopped answering the questions after the 4th page.

Good luck with your survey, but this clearly has nothing to do with languages, so I'll take the link down.

I recommend you use the Linguaholic Discord server then.
Most of the people are there instead of here, and the Spanish speaking community is huge by default, so it's very likely you'll find someone there.

All you have to do to join the Discord server is to click on the colourful banner right above the topic title.

Depends on what you mean with "pronunciation".

If you mean "the flow of speech", you could get a random comic or novel, and pronounce as you read.
I do this with the big amount of manga I bought over here over the past 2 years and never opened any of them yet, and I noticed really damn quick that not only my speech became very smooth very fast, I didn't need anyone to practise it too.

If you mean "the native-like pronunciation", I recommend watching YouTube videos in your target language, and shadow it.
No language tutorials, only real language!
I used videos by Japanese gaming YouTubers, noticed closely how they talk, replayed over and over again, and then tried to pronounce everything as they were talking.

Me working at a Japanese company helped me the most, but maybe you don't live in the country of your target language.
With the exception of me, everyone in the company I'm working for is monolingual Japanese speakers.
And even if you work at the company where your target language is used in your own country, chances are still high that your native language is still used most of the time.

I'll probably just wait until China is no longer a communist country.
I heard that Chinese people are very nice people and the food is delicious, but the whole social credit system is pretty scary, and whenever I go to a new country I prefer to explore the country outside of the tourist traps, and I heard that China won't allow you to do so anymore.
But at least one thing that China does better than the rest of the world (even though the rest of the world will follow suit after the 3rd of November) is that at least China stopped to brainwash the masses with the current corona hoax (from what I heard at least).

No.
A translation AI is adjusting based on human input, the human doesn't necessarily knows this, and the AI learns from everyone.
SEO on the other hand is a way for the search spider to find your website more easily, random users can't tell the spider what to find, however only website owners (and Google and their censors to add some hidden facts in it) can lead it into the right (or wrong) direction.

Plus in Google search there's a search bubble, lots of political manipulation (even though their TOS explicitely states that there's no way they will manipulate your political opinions, but Google is world famous for violating their own rules and getting away with it), lots of propaganda promotion (like putting CNN, Fox, etc. more visible), etc., it's all algorithms, but not quite the same as Google Translate.

One topic is enough.

I don't think I have favourite manga per se, but I enjoy many types of manga from both famous manga-ka and doujin circles.

From the big guys I read mostly ドラゴンボール超, 遊戯王, and Z/X Code reunion.
From the doujin circles I enjoy 宇崎ちゃんは遊びたい, お兄ちゃんはおしまい！, EAST VEGETA, DRAGON BALL K, and よーじょらいふ！.

And to be fair, I like what the doujin circles put out way more than what the big guys make.

I don't think I've ever tried to learn any rare languages before.
Probably both of my native languages are rarer than any languages I (tried to) learn(ed).

44 minutes ago, Joshua said:

I was not aware of the legal context, I also saw someone mentioning a birthday present. Achterklap is a normal Dutch word but maybe a little bit outdated. It's closer to "gossip" but I thought it worth mentioning since they're normally used together, at least they were when I lived there which was eight years ago for 32 years...

It's true that the original person mentioned they want to have it translated for a birthday.
However, "slander" in English is a legal term too.
Better yet, the Polish word pomówienia appears to be the orignal (non-translated) word.
I remember that "pomówienia" translates to Dutch as either "laster" or "smaad".
I'm a native speaker of both languages.

But I could give your the benefit of the doubt if you say that "achterklap" is a bit outdated.
Seems like you lived in the Netherlands for a longer time then the amount of time I'm alive altogether.