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fcuco

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fcuco last won the day on June 1 2022

fcuco had the most liked content!

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  • Currently studying
    German, Italian
  • Native tongue
    English,Spanish
  • Fluent in
    English, Spanish, German

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  1. Take a look at your day and you will find that you do a lot of activities that don't require your full attention where you could be doing something else at the same time, specially if you want to catch up with audio material, for example, doing laundry, washing the dishes, commuting, working out... all activities that would allow you to be hearing audio lessons at the same time. The key is to find stuff that you could do at the same time, for example, use the time it takes for your clothes to dry to practice writing sentences, use your time at the gym to listen to music in the language that you are studying and try to figure out the lyrics. You could be watching video lessons while using the treadmill, for example.
  2. The world already has that, it is English, for better or worse, it used to be French not too long ago, and Greek and Latin before that (although those were not worldwide languages but mostly the "lingua franca" of most of Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia). As soon as you start to lear about other languages you discover that different tongues have expressions that you lack in your native language, and that you posses ways to express yourself that other languages lack, in my opinion no language is complete and rich enough to serve as the general language for all mankind, a language is just more than a tool for communication, it is a way in which a culture approaches and understands the whole world, I am ok with having different paradigms all over the world.
  3. The site is very scarce in information, so it is hard to tell what it is about before it asks you to sing in for a free trial, you should beef up the front page a little more just to let people know what your whole thing is about, you could leave the call to action button right where it is, but try to describe your product more. You are collecting information, like emails and full names, so I would advice you to add a privacy policy to your site, there are plenty of sites were you can generate one for free depending on the type of information that you will eventually collect, if it includes, I presume, credit card information then make sure that you add one ASAP.
  4. This could work, but I think you have an Usability problem there. It was kind of complicated to filter all posts to just display the ones that I was interested in (German), I saw that you have labels at the bottom but you have both "German" and "Learn German", as an user I am confused... Are those 2 equivalent? If I choose "Learn German" I am going to miss some posts? I know this is related to the platform (you re using Blogger and that's ok) but perhaps you could think about structuring your content a little better, for example if somebody arrives at your page directly via http://www.waialo.com/ we are greeted with a post about Italian, so you may think "ok this is an Italian learning blog", then the next post is about German, that's confusing.
  5. I love that expression, "danke für die Blumen", the literal translation is "thank you for the flowers" but it is more something like "thank you for the compliments" . What I love about it is that it is more used with a bit of irony, like when someone gives you a back handed compliment or tells you something bad about you. I love the irony twists because german idioms are usually very rigid.
  6. I don't know, because being "fluent" is not a discrete state, I would say that it is more of a continuum, slowly but surely you develop your skills. Something the fluency of your language has to do with the subject matter, for example, maybe you are comfortable enough approaching an Hotel front desk and renting a room without issues but once you try to speak about a certain topic where you lack much of the vocabulary then you realize that you are struggling to find the correct terms and words.
  7. This is a very cool concept, if only a level editor could be developed, I imagine a lot of people coming up with amazing puzzle like levels using the different blocks, or very fast paced ones using a combination of those red floors with the yellow ones. I loved the music too.
  8. I am guessing that what you guys are calling "British English" is the received pronunciation, in terms of accents the UK has a rich mixture of very different accents and some of them are quite frankly, pretty ugly. I still prefer the "classic" British accent (or what we now know as a British accent) but I prefer the american spelling of the language, probably because I was more exposed to that and I can't stand words like centre, it is center!
  9. Some of the languages that you mentioned are not exactly dying and have plenty of active and fluent speakers, like Latin (at least the ecclesiastical one), if people were to stop using them at least we have extensive documentation of vocabulary, written words and grammar rules to reconstruct the language, and even hours and hours of audio samples to reconstruct the pronunciation (the modern one that is). Really endangered languages have only a couple of living speakers and barely any written works. Luckily some people are working to preserve those languages, if you are interested you could search for Verdena Parker, to see an example. Can you imagine being the only person in the world that can speak a language? Nobody understands you... That's lonely.
  10. For what is worth, in some European countries the north - south divide is pretty stark, not only in terms of accents, but in culture and even going as far as the way people actually look, I can think of Italy as an example of this, there is a really palpable animosity between people from the North of Italy and people from the South, so much so that you can usually tell them apart, people from the north then to look more Germanic while people from the South are more mediterranean with all the bad (and mostly false) stereotypes associated to this look.
  11. Just be careful, some more "urban" genres actually use slang and some broken English. It is also very important to be familiar with the slang, some idioms and expressions that people use, that's how people talk in real life after all, but you have to be very careful and recognize the difference because when you are learning a language you should learn the proper grammar and form first, speak correctly, then familiarize yourself with slangs. This applies to other forms of entertainment and for all languages.
  12. What's with the weird region thing? I assume it has to do with Nintendo and not you, since I am guessing you would prefer a wider release. Where can I find some game footage? It is possible to download a demo? Do you use the stylus? The accelerometers?
  13. What works for you? Some people are very visual, some people are very into auditory sensations, some people learn better when music is involved. For instance I learn better while I am listening to something while doing some mindless activity like walking or working out. My suggestion to you is to try audio lessons in Spanish, I am sure that there are podcasts and such, find one of those, downloaded them into an iPod or any portable music device and listen to the lesson while doing something else, cooking, doing the dishes, while driving, and so on. This are chores that you have to do anyway so you may as well do something more productive with the time that it takes to do them.
  14. I like Italian love songs, specially old ones from the 70s and 80s. Italian is a beautiful language even when people are simply speaking, it is very musical, so it goes pretty well with a voice singing it. I often translate the lyrics out of curiosity not as an exercise to learn or practice the language, just because that I know that I am going to find the actual translated lyrics to be nice and poetic. Side note, one of the main reasons that got me into learning languages was the fact that I used to listen to music in other languages and it occurred to me that I had to at least understand or know the themes and ideas of the songs that I was listening... maybe I was supporting and artist that was singing stuff that went against my believes or values, that's a stretch but you get my point.
  15. Even if you took it seriously for my case, the class size was simply too big, you had a mixture of people with all kinds of skills levels and proficiency with the language, so the class had to move at the pace of the slower students, there was no way to adjust the learning plan to your individual needs or skills so you either felt bored or left behind, there was not enough time for you to practice your conversation skills and the teacher had to grade 30 or more students so there was no time for a more individualized training. The only part of the world where learning a language in High School appears to have any impact is on countries or Nordic Europe where everybody appears to pop out of school speaking perfect English, everywhere else everybody has to take a language course in High School and the entire population leaves school without a trace of any knowledge regarding the language that they "studied" for years.
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