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Linguaholic

Lingua Franca

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Everything posted by Lingua Franca

  1. It depends what newspaper it is and who it's their target audience is. If the target is broader the vocabulary used tends to be simpler, but if they have a smaller target audience the vocabulary can be quite a bit more complex, you normally find this in business newspapers, on the other hand football newspapers tend to be the simplest.
  2. Yes of course, and I am always fluent in it. Funnily enough I can't understand the words that I am saying but understand perfectly what I have said and what the person I am talking to is saying. It is something so surreal but then again dreams normally are.
  3. There isn't just one language because English is a mix of both Latin and Germanic languages. The two bigger languages that are closest to English is French and Dutch. There are other smaller Germanic languages that are considered closer but they would be hard to learn since there isn't a lot of learning material for them.
  4. Here is a site the games are very simple and the graphics aren't out of this world but it will give you an idea of how they function. http://www.digitaldialects.com/
  5. The funny thing is because you have the visual cue, you actually do remember the words. It's much easier associating the word to an image then just trying to remember the word by itself. It really does work.
  6. I find the same thing, if ever I try to learn a language I normally will get the phonetics down a lot faster then the writing. I don't only mean in the cases of languages that don't use the Latin alphabet. Every languages has their own writing rules and they sometimes take longer to learn then actually speaking the language.
  7. I most certainly agree with you having something to chase can be a great motivator. I think sometimes the only reason people don't learn more languages is because they don't have a good reason to do so.
  8. Even though there are some really nice scripts out there now days, there is nothing that quit gets close to the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The were the real two in one pictures and writing. I think that's why people are still drawn to them.
  9. For me is knowing that I am going to use the language. Looking at a movie and trying to not look at the subtitles or planing a trip to a place were they speak the language keeps me motivated and makes me learn more in as little time as possible.
  10. These languages are quit distinct. If they weren't the speakers of these languages would understand each other without much difficulty, which they don't. Their bases might be the same but since Latin is divided into three different eras early, middle and late Latin, some languages will use the words of certain periods instead of others. Spanish has a lot of words from middle Latin while the other Latin languages tend to use words from the late Latin era. All this with local words and distinctive pronunciations make them different languages.
  11. I have played some language comes some years back and they really do help. The best way to learn a language is if you are having fun and games do this very well. Movies are another good tool but in the case of games you are interacting with something while with movies you are just listening to a dialogue.
  12. I have found that some movies really are translated very accurately while others change the movie completely. i think that it must be more difficult to translate movies then books for instance. Since there are visual cues who ever is doing the translating can't stray to much from the original text, even though they sometimes do.
  13. If you really want to take your English to the next level I suggest moving to an English speaking country. That is the only real way to see at what level your English really is and it will help you iron out any short falls you might still have.
  14. I don't think it's the best way to learn a language. Very often singing artist will distort words on purpose in order for it to sound better in the music. It could create a certain amount of confusion when you hear the word correctly pronounced.
  15. Newspapers have limited space so they will use the shortest word possible to explain an event instead of writing a full sentence. I think even experienced speakers will have difficulty with one or two words that they use in order to save space. Books on the other hand are the direct opposite. They need to write longer sentences in order to reach a certain word count so it can be easier to read.
  16. I have found that quit often, I have spoken to a lot of people that had 5 or 6 years of a language and are still not able to grasp it completely. They would get good marks in their tests but are not able to have a full conversation in the language they learned. I think that is the problem you have in many educational establishments. They are more worried about the tests results instead of whether the student has actually learned the language or not.
  17. If you don't want to use the internet then the best way to learn a language is find a course that teaches Spanish. It would be better if you could find a school that taught Spanish but there are still courses that have books and audio to help you learn a language.
  18. If you really want to be fluent in any one of those languages visiting or better yet living in those countries is a must. I think that you have judge for yourself, if you feel comfortable learning both Japanese and Mandarin at the same time then there is no reason not to do so, but if you feel that it's becoming over whelming and that you are mixing the languages then the ideal is to stick to Japanese for now and then later on learn Mandarin.
  19. Yes I have, I didn't get to finish the book right to the end but I did get about half way. I was still learning German at the time and tried to read a classic German book. I think I only understood every other word but I did get a good idea of the general story with which I was pleased with.
  20. That is something that people very often don't do, but it really does help. It's even better if you speak out loud and don't just have the conversation in your head. Very often people find that they can pronounce the words in their head but once it comes time to be oral it's a whole other story.
  21. That is probably one of the things that can make learning a language take longer. The more familiar the language the easier it's to learn but there are people that learn another language that is very distant from there own quickly and very often they can't even explain why this is. I guess some people just have a knack for certain languages.
  22. Wow, I am really impressed. These sites are great, I did a test run with the first site and the pronunciation is really good. This can really be a great help for anyone that wants to learn a language.
  23. I was already curious about languages when I was at school, unfortunately I was also interested in other subjects as well, so I left most of my language learn for after school. I remember I had to give up one of the subjects that I had in order to learn German, I ended up putting it to the side and learnt it after I graduated from High school.
  24. I don't think that there is an easier or harder part that for all the languages. I have found that some languages the grammatical part was the hardest while for others the pronunciation. There is still the vocabulary, if the language is very different form any language that you might know it can be a real barrier.
  25. I think with time you would learn to speak with one another maybe not in in each others language but a mix of the two. I have heard of this happening before and the people ended up getting along quite well. As they say love knows no boundaries.
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