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yong321

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Everything posted by yong321

  1. http://yong321.freeshell.org/bcc/ Basic Chinese Characters contains 2500 commonly used Chinese characters. The book sorts the characters by usage frequency. A learner may choose a certain point in the book suitable to his or her level and start to learn the characters. The book is a good way to learn or review Chinese characters in a casual way and on a cell phone. [Update Feb 3] Found and corrected some errors. Added page numbers to the bottom of pages. Made the PDF file smaller.
  2. Amazon allows me to make the book free during promotion periods. I'll do this promotion frequently.
  3. susceptible touchy, sensitive, delicate, easily offended; (followed by de) likely, apt. Note that this word in the first sense is not quite the same in meaning as English susceptible. And the second meaning is absent in the English word. Examples, cette dame est très susceptible (“this lady is very touchy”); la proposition est susceptible d’être acceptée (“the proposal is likely to be accepted”). fringues (informal) clothes. Unknown etymology. As a mnemonic, think of the fringes of clothes. pendule pendulum (masc. n.) (cognate); pendulum clock, small clock (fem. n.). Note the different genders. To remember them, as a mnemonic, consider the fact that men like the mechanism of a machine (such as the pendulum) while women like the whole machine as a usable gadget. dauphin dolphin; successor, dauphin (heir apparent, héritier apparent). English dolphin is from Old French and dauphin from Modern French (hence the unchanged spelling). It is justifiable to give two distinct etymologies to these two words, spelled the same in French. The latter, meaning “successor”, is from the title assumed by Guigo the Count in 1140 and by the eldest son of King of France in 1343. It’s possible that the adoption of this title was originally related to the sea animal dolphin, commonly seen in Southeast France.
  4. amateur lover (of something), enthusiast; amateur, non-professional. Note unlike in English, this word does not have the negative connotation of “being inexperienced”. After all, it’s from a Latin word from which French amour (“love”) and English amorous are derived. Examples, un amateur de musique (“a music lover”); un photographe amateur (“an amateur / non-professional photographer”). semelle sole (of shoe). Unknown etymology. Use a mnemonic such as “the sole of the shoe smells”.
  5. Language difficulty can be measured, as long as we set a few criteria. See my article at http://english-for-chinese.blogspot.com/2017/09/language-difficulty.html
  6. No, you cannot. Omitting "about" at the end makes the sentence ungrammatical. By the way, "ain't" is bad English.
  7. Never mind. The web site AsiHablamos.com already does a very good job at this. To go the other direction, i.e. given an English word, find the Spanish word in different Spanish speaking countries or regions, Wordreference.com more or less meets this need.
  8. The multilingual idioms project is quite successful. We should start some other projects which other language forums don't do. An interesting one I can think of is Spanish words in different regions of the world. As of today, to find regional differences of a Spanish word, we have to google for its meanings scattered in various forums. But it would be nice to have one single table that contains most such words. (Is there any way to remove the embedded page preview? It's distracting. But I want to reference that page, as a link only.)
  9. Yeah, I know. That's the problem of blindly trusting the Internet. Hopefully Google has some kind of algorithm to avoid this kind of mistake.
  10. Google Translate started to provide frequencies for translated words probably in late 2019. Given a single word, the translated words are given 1 to 3 bars of frequency, which "Indicates how often a translation appears in public documents". It's a great feature! If anybody knows another dictionary that ranks the frequency of translated words, please let me know. Here's my question. What does it mean if the translated word is not the most frequent and yet it's given as the default translation? For example, Source language: French. Target Language: English. French word: froisser. In the English textbox on the right, it shows crumple. But under this textbox are listed offend with 3 bars, crease 2 bars, crumple 2 bars, .... If offend more frequently appears as a translated word for froisser than crumple, why is crumple instead of offend the default translation? And, of the multiple words with 2 bars, why is crumple chosen instead of say crease? If this message is off-topic, I apologize. I posted it to the Google Translate forum (https://support.google.com/translate/thread/62053485?hl=en) but I get no answer there.
  11. Come on, you don't need to feel depressed on the limit of human language that our ancestors have used for thousands of years! Seriously though, there's no way to precisely express what you want. A natural language is not a computer language, which *can* be extended logically. In your case, you either just continue to use "had stolen" with one "had", and let the reader infer from the context, or break the sentence up.
  12. gaspiller to waste. Uncertain etymology. According to one theory, it is cognate with spill. Use a mnemonic such as “Look, gas (gasoline) spills. You’re wasting it.” or “Gas spillage is a waste.” béquille crutch; (bicycle or motorcycle) kickstand. From bec (“beak of a bird”). The crosspiece on top of the crutch resembles a bird’s beak. bourguignon Burgundian. From Latin Burgundionem, where the -ndi- group easily lost d. If we trace to Proto-Indo-European, the name Burgundy is cognate with burg and borough, which are part of the names of many US towns.
  13. '"economic" as a verb'? '... economic, is used as a noun'? The word economic is neither a verb nor a noun.
  14. It would be nice to allow visitors see what's in there without signing up. Otherwise people just leave without leaving a word.
  15. Not sure how to use it. Why not give clear instructions on the homepage? Spanish is fine. But without instructions, first-time users quietly turn away.
  16. It depends on the age of the learner. For young children, at an age generally considered younger than 7, assimilation is the way to go. For adults, you have to consciously learn a foreign language. Assimilation won't work. (Picking a few words and expressions doesn't count.) If there's a successful story about assimilation alone, I'd love to know.
  17. I agree. Both are correct. But (1) is more common. (2) is correct because the answer can be "Such and such are the major differences ..." English uses the same word, "what", to start the clause regardless whether it acts as the object or subject in the clause.
  18. Many people have suggested listening to native speakers and living in the country where the language is spoken. Note that as an adult, we have largely lost the innate capability of learning the native accent by listening. This loss is said to start around the age of 7 (but various researches say it differently). Being able to discern the difference in other people's pronunciation is always easier than being able to utter it yourself, even for a child. Although some adults have remarkable talent in mimicking unfamiliar sounds, many don't. For example, many Chinese Americans still pronounce "mug" as /mag/ (where /a/ is the the first part of the diphthong /aɪ/ in "high") instead of /mʌɡ/, even though they have listened to the native speakers for decades. They can tell the difference between the correct /mʌɡ/ and the wrong /mag/ when listening. But they have trouble in speech production. How can they improve? My suggestion is to carefully studying International Phonetic Alphabet, or at least the vowel graph of it, combined with focused listening and self-practice.
  19. I agree with both linguaholic and Xequeo. My suggestion is to just change to an easier and more interesting book. I always wonder if there's research to prove my hypothesis, i.e. if the study material can be understood about 70 or 80%, you'll have the highest efficiency and make the fastest progress. This is about both reading and listening. Nowadays I don't allocate large chunks of time studying languages. I mostly read one page of Facebook newsfeed from Le Figaro, Der Spiegel, ... sometimes plus readers' comments, and memorize a few words or expressions I didn't know or know well. (I use an outdated web browser to read Facebook to avoid infinite scrolling.) Reading one page takes little time. But I do this a few times a day. Studying languages many times a day, but for a short duration every time, is efficient for me and keeps me interested.
  20. Someone brought to my attention the book CHINESE IDIOMS AND THEIR ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS (https://www.amazon.com/CHINESE-IDIOMS-THEIR-ENGLISH-EQUIVALENTS/dp/9620700430/) It cannot be previewed on Google Books or Amazon. But one reader's review on Amazon tells us how the entry looks like. It's a wonderful dictionary. The authors did exactly what this Multilingual Idiom List does, limited to Chinese-English only but with a far greater number of entries. It may be the only Chinese-English idiom dictionary ever created if we emphasize the word "equivalents" in the title. I don't know if there're other idiom dictionaries between two (or better yet, more than two) languages that list the equivalent idioms.
  21. " a current " -> "the current" (if I understand you correctly) "The speed" -> "Speed" (just to be consistent with the other subtitles) " , everyone " -> ". Everyone" or "; everyone" " , all passengers" -> ". All passengers" or "; all passengers" " Passengers health" -> "Safety of the passengers" (I don't think you're talking about people's health here.) " , we still have not enough" -> ": we still don't have enough" or "is that we still don't have enough" " railway ... that" -> "the railway system ... than"
  22. Regarding "the younger the better", I've always wondered if that claim is only valid for certain modes of language capability. (Mode refers to reading, listening, writing, speaking, etc.) For example, it's extremely difficult for an adult to learn a foreign language and be able to speak with no accent. It's also difficult, at least compared with a child, for an adult to learn to speak and listen. But an adult can learn to read with probably the same difficulty or ease as a child. I occasionally check the latest research on Second Language Acquisition on various websites but don't recall seeing such study differentiating the modes of language capability with respect to age of learning.
  23. More sample words: inhabituel unusual, uncustomary. Since habituel means “usual”, “customary”, “habitual”, this word with the in- prefix means exactly the opposite. Just don’t confuse it with English inhabit (which would be habiter in French) or its related words. The key to remember is that English prefix in- here means “in”, “within”, “inside” while French in- signifies negation. Thus, for instance, English inhabitable is French habitable, English uninhabitable is French inhabitable. épater to amaze, to flabbergast. épatant amazing, stupefying, splendid. The root is patte (“animal’s paw or leg”). It’s said the word originally referred to breaking off (é-) the foot (patte) of a glass, by an angry gambler (Cf. Charles Virmaître, Dictionnaire d'argot fin-de-siècle). Actually, this word is more about “to amaze or impress (with talent etc.)” than “to surprise or alarm” in general. English idiom knock off one’s feet (as on hearing one winning a grand prize) is a good match literally and figuratively, although its origin is unlikely related to this French word. If you know Spanish, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that Spanish despatarrar (where pata means “leg”) can also mean “to amaze”, as well as, if used reflexively, “to open legs wide” or “to manspread”. See also patte.
  24. That's indeed a great idea. I can see the value in language studies. But I wish the books they publish were originally in more diverse languages. I mean, look at the selection of the titles. Most were written in English, and then translated to other languages. I would love to have e.g. Don Quixote in Spanish and English, Madame Bovary in French and English, Calvino's novels in Italian and English, etc. I recently read Le Petit Prince in French, English and Chinese (a trilingual book) and noted quite a few differences or even errors in the English and Chinese translations. It was fun.
  25. I'm a little surprised too. But note that the poll creator has both Mandarin and Chinese. If you add the two together, Chinese will be lower than Russian but higher than Portuguese. It's still lower than what many people would expect. The reason may be that this poll is about people's free choice of languages to study, not really out of usefulness to their career or work. Secondly, the members of the Polyglots group are probably concentrated in Europe. (I'm guessing. I don't have the stats.) It makes sense for Europeans to study Europeans languages more than non-European languages.
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