anna3101

It's not bad - you can organize meetings and meet new local friends, as well as natives to practise your language. But you are right that it's more of a "meet people" site rather than "ask questions or discuss languages online". At least, that's the impression I've always had.

Polish keyboard works perfectly well for English and Polish though. I don't understand why some people here in Poland have both American/UK and Polish keyboards in their language bar? Seems like a waste of Shift-Ctrl to me.

I have to agree - it's one thing if you're trying to brush up your skills and just repeat something but if you're starting from the scratch and the book is organized in terms of topics, like "saying hello", "talking on the phone", "food", the grammar tends to be messed up with some bits of this here and bits of that there, and it's really harder to learn. One of the things I enjoy in those "more serious" textbooks is that they go from simple bits of grammar to more complicated ones. It's not always the case in the brand new colourful coursebooks I see in the shops. When you are on an advanced level, that's fine - I even prefer it that way. But when you know nothing about the language and you're getting some really complicated constructs in lesson 4? I've seen plenty of people get discouraged and lose interest And I can't blame them for it. I find a mix of "old-style" and "new-style" works best for me. I'm sorry if my definition is a bit off to you, I was just trying to describe the general trend I've seen during my lifetime.

Have you ever been in this situation... You are abroad, in that nice country whose language you've been learning, so excited to finally test your newly acquired skills. You go inside the shop and proudly say "Good morning, I'd like a bottle of mineral water, please" - in a foreign language of the country in question, of course. Maybe your accent is not that great. Or maybe you are still struggling with words and mix them up a bit. Either way, the shop assistant smiles and says in perfect English: "It's all right, I speak English! Sparking or still?" And your good mood goes like "pffff" I've had many situations like that in Berlin this year, when I was desperately trying to practise a bit of my beginner's German and friendly people were invariably replying in English, even if they were happily chatting to each other in German just a second ago. What do you do in such situations? Do you give up or just go on trying?

I've heard about that page and actually use it sometimes. Very rarely though. I've met a lot of nice people there at the time when I was really using the site a lot, back when I was a student, and even visited some penfriends while travelling around Europe. But that was quite a long time ago, I don't travel that much anymore and I was getting a bit annoyed with a lot of irrelevant messages that I was receiving. So now I go there fairly rarely.

Introverts are also homo sapiens, just like the rest of humanity, so of course they can and do learn languages. I'm an introvert myself and I love learning. It seems to me that some people equal "introvert" with "completely cut off from the rest of society". This is not true, at least, not always. I don't have a huge circle of acquiantances, and my perfect idea of a weekend is at home with a book but that doesn't mean I never enjoy talking to people. Besides, even if us introverts decided to spend our whole lives behind closed doors, we'd still have the Internet and books, and so be more than capable of learning (and speaking) a language.

For French, I always add it to the language bar in Windows and switch between keyboards. The only way to make typing easier is, in my view, to learn touch-typing. I don't imagine life without it. It takes some time to learn to touch-type in each new language, especially if there's a big difference, like between Russian and English, but once you've learnt it, it's yours forever. Even if you don't practise for a long time, you pick it up again fairly quickly if you need to.

My favourite is a quote from Ryszard Kapuscinski which roughly translated into English like this: "I realized that each world had its own mystery and that you can access it only by the way of the language.. <...> I realized that the more words I learn, the richer, fuller and more diverse will the world, that has opened up to me, be."

Trellum, you've probably already used all those nice tips and found lots of time to study Dutch, you should tell us what time-managing methods worked best for you I try to look up new words or phrases whenever I come across them at work or at home, listen to songs while walking and read something in a foreign language while commuting. I'd never be able to sacrifice sleep though - it's too precious. Besides, I find that whatever you learn just before you go to sleep stays in your head much better. I don't know why, there must be some kind of scientific explanation for that. So, whenever I need to learn something really quick, I repeat it before going to sleep. And the Internet! A great way to learn some new things while also having fun. Also helps to get a better idea of what's really going on in the world - it's amazing the difference you get when reading about the same event in different languages from different news sites

And the amazing thing is - you never know just when and how a language may come in handy. Some people said learning French was useless - and then it turned out that an ability to speak French was one of the most important factors for most of my employment history! A friend of mine constantly heard comments about how Dutch will never be needed by any employer - and then she got an excellent offer because she was the only Dutch-speaking person in her whole company. And there were plenty of situations abroad when speaking English did not help at all - but another language saved the day.

I've seen a thread about meetup in the Spanish subforum but it relates to any language really. Have you ever used meetup as a way to meet native speakers in your city and practise your languages? I've only tried it recently, and it seems to be a good starting place for meeting people that speak a particular language. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find groups for all the languages I am interested in, and I'm not brave enough to start my own. What are your experiences? Have you ever used meetup or another similar site to practise your speaking skills?

Do you have apps that are not strictly speaking language-learning related but that help you to study? Which ones can you recommend? Maybe there are games that help you learn new words or some motivational apps that keep you on track when it comes to regular study hours. Let's share the titles that are useful for making progress in language learning!

For sure, languages always borrow words from each other. You can find a lot of words borrowed from German and French in Russian. All of the languages I'm learning have their fair share of words borrowed from English, I think that's nr 1 "lender" language when it comes to new words, especially in the IT field.

I wonder what you think of old-style coursebooks versus modern-style? By "old style" I mean the books for language learning that were widespread in the past: no (or minimum) pictures, a lot of exercises (with big emphasis on translation to and from target language), a lot of grammar - grammar rules, grammar exceptions, pages and pages of grammar exercises. That's what foreign language textbooks in my school used to be like when I was in primary school. By "modern style" I mean the books that you are popular nowadays: a lot of images, more listening and less exercises, more speaking and less grammar. I've always liked the "colourful" ones more, however, to really learn a language I do need to have access to plain old-fashioned grammar books. To actually read all about the rules and not just something like "Past tense is easy! See these nice cute boxes with some info here and go on creating your own sentences". What about you?

It would be useful, yes, especially for translators. Sometimes you just can't find the right equivalent for some idiom and you feel like banging your head against the wall. If you're lucky, you can find some materials online (I remember using some sites where people compared Russian idioms and their English equivalents). But if you work with some rare/unpopular language, then it's getting quite hard. Sometimes you can find some useful things on bab.la (I think they are also using some official documents to compare the same phrase in different languages).

Hello Cave Bear, I love the idea of learning by playing. I have a lot of board games at hand but not D&D. I wonder how I could put the board games to use if their ingredients (cards, tokens, maps etc) are not in a target language. Do you think it's still possible to incorporate some elements of language learning into it? The thing is, not all of my friends speak good English, so I buy all the games in Polish, to make sure everybody understands what the game is about. Do you have any tips on how to make such games work for language learning? Or is buying the French/German/English version the only way to go? Thanks, Ania

I wonder if anyone here has an English word (or maybe even many words!) that you not can only remember as such, but also you remember the time/day/moment/ when you acquired it? If you do, please share your words with me! It's so interesting that some words really do stay with you, and do it so well that you can even memorise how they did it I'll share some of mine. "drawback" - I remember I saw this word first when I was in my 7th school year, in the school English textbook. I was so amazed that I hadn't found such a useful word before. Stayed with me ever since. "point of view" - this one came from Unit 1 in Blueprint Upper Intermediate Student's Book when I was in my 10th year "brocade" - came across this one 4 years ago while reading some Agatha Christie. It seemed so rich and decadent, both in meaning and sound, that somehow I remembered it immediately. "to lurk" - first saw it in "Good Omens" (a very funny book, by the way). Imagined someone "lurking" very vividly. Added it to my vocabulary. Do you have words like that too?

I find that etymology helps if there's a really interesting story behind a certain word or idiom. if it's just something like "the word was borrowed from language X in century Y", it doesn't make learning any easier. But if there's some kind of funny, weird or mysterious story behind it - yes, I'll remember it much, much better.

I've always said that yes, I do believe it's possible to learn a language in a year or so, for sure... given that you need no job, have plenty of money and can devote every single hour of your day to this task. And your motivation stays top notch all the time. And you don't even get tired. But realistically, how many people are that lucky? I really don't imagine you could ever become fluent in, say, Arabic in less than two years when you have a job, a family and some other tasks at hand. Not unless you own a time machine or something I sure would love to buy a couple more hours to the meager 24 that we have each day!

I absolutely hate the idea of one language. Each one is a part of history and culture, and taking that away would leave us poorer, less willing to exercise our brains by learning a new language and having less incentive to discover another country. I come from ex-USSR and that makes me quite skeptical about "one nation", "one language", "let's make all people equal" and other similar schools of thought. The intentions may be good but it never works in the real world. And I don't agree that most conflicts are about language incomprehension. Power? Religion? Money? Yes to all of those. But language being a big part of the world conflicts? If I were a politician, I'd go in a totally different direction. Make sure countries, big or small, are promoting their language and teaching children several languages at school. As it was already mentioned in some other thread here, learning foreign languages has nothing but benefits to those who do it.

I prefer the British version. The pronunciation is just so beautiful. I could listen, and listen, and listen...

That's an interesting idea - thanks, Cave Bear! I'll list mine. They are just two Right now I'm using dict.cc app for all of my languages, to be able to check words on the go, especially in places where there's no wi-fi. And the other one is MyKoala, a cute little app for learning words. I must admit I love games and gamification of learning. And animals. So I was totally sold when I saw that the idea of the app is to get points from learning words to feed and otherwise take care of a koala I also have (and play) some language-related games. My favourites are Guess Words (Russian) and Highrise Word Heroes (English).

Hello Cave Bear, and welcome! You are brave for tackling so many difficult languages. My hat's off to you Hope you like it here. Ania

I've started my project, sellotape seems to be the doing the trick for now. I hope they won't fall off before we learn them all! That's a good motivation to speed up the process I guess I'll probably add some words and sentences not related to household items and put them in the places where I spend a lot of time. Like kitchen.

General / Language Courses: http://www.polishforums.com/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/polish/ http://mowicpopolsku.com/ http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/ Reading: http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/poland.htm http://literat.ug.edu.pl/autors.htm https://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategoria:Autorzy_alfabetycznie Video & Audio: http://www.polskieradio.pl/ http://www.tvp.pl/ Grammar: http://www.learnpolishfeelgood.com/index.html http://free.of.pl/g/grzegorj/gram/gram00.html Dictionaries: http://sjp.pwn.pl/ http://oxford.pwn.pl/ http://pl.bab.la/slownik/polski-angielski/ http://ling.pl/ http://www.wordreference.com/plen/