babelle

I guess when you learn the so-called most frequently used words in a language, your list of words would consist mostly of words that are used in everyday common conversations. Newspapers, on the other hand, use a more formal language to bring the news or discuss the issues of the day. That is one of the challenges of language learning.

For adults, learning English through songs is probably not as effective as watching English cartoons or dramas where you can listen to whole English sentences in everyday settings. A song is written with a creative license just like poems so if you're intentionally learning English though songs, you might get the wrong idea or grammar structure. It might be effective for children though because there are a lot of song materials that are specially created to teach vocabulary words.

A lot of people are doing that and I too would take time to learn a language for a great job opportunity. In Germany, for instance, they are in need of ICU nurses who can speak German so a lot of nurses would want to get a certification for proficiency in German just to get those high paying jobs. It's really no different from learning a technical skill to land a job.

Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian may have originated from Latin but they have certainly come into their own. Portuguese, for one, has two major branches - Brazilian Portuguese and the Portuguese spoken in Portugal. There are a lot of things in common among these languages but they are certainly distinct languages that requires individual study. I agree, though, that it will be easier to study French or Italian if you know Spanish because then you'll know that verbs are conjugated according to number and gender and that everything has gender, including tables and chairs. But then, French would be more difficult to learn because of the liaisons and elisions.

People might be surprised to know that there are two kinds of Latin pronunciation:, The Ecclesiastical Latin and the Classical Latin. The Ecclesiastical Latin is the one used by the Vatican while the Classical Latin is the way scholars assume Latin was pronounced by the Romans. While many schools and universities have stopped requiring the study of Latin in their curriculum, it remains to be the most alive 'dead' language in the planet. Learning Latin will give you an advantage if you want to go into the legal profession. It is also still widely used in the sciences, biology, taxonomy, and medicine. I once had a book project that required me to put together Latin grammar and conversational Latin in one ebook. I enjoyed learning the language and I was surprised at the wealth of resources that I found on the internet about Latin. A dead language, indeed!

There's not much interest for foreigners to learn the Filipino language because most Filipinos can speak and understand English. In addition, even if they do learn Filipino, foreigners will find that although it is the national language, there are many other dialects being used by natives in other parts of the country. Filipino is simple and easy to learn though.

el papel - los papeles : the paper - the papers It's not just about learning the Spanish word for something, it's also about learning the right articles to use which must conform in gender and number with the noun they modify.

It will probably be easier to learn a language from a non-native speaker because he or she will probably speak the language without the native twang or accent associated with the language. Some students, however, would prefer listening to and learning from a native speaker because they also want to absorb the accent, and perhaps the nuances of the language. It's like, I can read and write in English, but if I have to listen to a fast-talking Brit or American, I might not be able to understand a word at all. I would say it has to be a mixture of both. Learn the basic from a non-native speaker then enrich your learning with a native speaker as a teacher.

For me, the best way to learn Spanish is to first master the basics: the alphabet, pronunciation, numbers, telling time and date, measurement, colors, introductions, weather phrases, and other survival phrases. That's because there's hardly any Spanish speakers in my country and to learn it, you have to consciously take an effort. In lieu of listening to Spanish speakers around, I'll recommend listening to audio recording of Spanish conversations. Applying it by speaking and using the language daily is a must if you want to retain your learning and that should be difficult if there are no other speakers around. Thankfully, the internet offers many resources for connecting with fellow language learners.

I don't think that a universal translator will be able to replace language learning in the next 50 years or so, if at all. For one, it will be difficult for machine translators to tell the nuances of each language. In French, Spanish, and Filipino, we can form questions by simply raising the tone at the end of what seems like a declarative sentence. Sounds simple, but how do computers translate questions like that and still make it appear like a question? In Filipino, there's this classic joke about the question "Bababa ba?" In English, it means "Is it going down?" I am sure that the machine translator will simply go crazy with that.

Google Translate is terribly inefficient and inaccurate if you have to translate sentences. I wrote a book on learning Spanish, German, and French and I can say that it worked well for Spanish but not that well, just much better than it did for other languages. With German, it was awful. German has different cases which is manifested in the articles and modifiers and Google Translator simply got lost in the translation. If you have to use a translator, don't rely on Google. There are translators that work best for each language and you have to find what's best for the language you're studying. What's more, use them to partly check your work, but never rely 100% on free translation.