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Learning a Language in the Digital Age
UmmRa points out his discussion of four flash-card programs for language learning, excerpting "As someone who has learned three dead languages in the past six years (Latin, Egyptian, and Akkadian) I have had my share of experience with language software....If there is one thing I have learned from the experience, it is that no program is a panacea. Until we all have Matrix-esque jacks at the base of our skulls, learning a language will be a process that requires some amount of work and time. However that does not mean there isn't cheap (or free!) software out there to greatly simplify the process." None of the program compared are free (or Free), though two are shareware; two of them are for Windows only, one is Mac-only, and the other is "Java based, so it can operate on any platform." Update: 03/21 02:34 GMT by T : The actual link got dropped -- my fault -- in editing this post; now fixed.
Wikipedia has a pretty good, though short, article on the Akkadian language.
Egyptians long ago gave up the Egyptian language and started speaking Arabic.
Along with your elementary Hindi readers and text books, watch Hindi movies! In Bollywood movies they speak excellent Hindi, and it generally isn't corrupted as it is spoken by people who natively speak Gujarati, Marathi or one of the other non-Hindi Indian languages. And you also get entertained.
I learn't basic Japanese with this site. Enough to start reading online dictionaries and forums. Combined with countless hours of anime... ;-) I'm about ready for my trip to Japan next year to see how it all paid off.
:-\
In conclusion, there's more than a few references for any language online, learn the basics, then start from the ground up in "Real Life"(tm). Like a kid that's learning his first tongue. Only other advice I can give is to learn the language on its own, use the basics of the language as a catapult to learn the rest with sites that use that actual language and if you don't know the meaning, use a dictionary (don't translate, just define). If you try to learn a language by becoming a walking babel-fish... you'll sound like it when having a conversation. And that ain't a good thing. You get the whole immigrant accent going on. My parents have that...
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
immersion
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
BBC Languages is great for starting out any of the major European langues(they even have a little Chinese in there as well), it's free, and most importantly there is plenty of audio.
I am moving to Germany in June for 2 years and started learning it using that. Let me impart a bit of advice to you, make sure you learn to listen and speak before you delve deep into grammar and vocab. I made the mistake with learning Japanese purely by book until I took a few classes at my college. Even though I lived there for 6 months, to this day I can still write/read Japanese with ease but I have trouble listening to it.
Monstar L
Latin doesn't have a Subject Object Verb structure. It has a Subject Object Verb convention, which is often ignored. Instead word meaning is imparted by the endings of the word itself. A Nominative ending means Subject, Accusative means Object, and verbs are given conjugated endings (I, you, he/she/it, either singular or plural), et cetera...
For those who don't speak Latin:
"Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound."
I've been studying Chinese for a number of years and here are a few things I've found very useful:
WenLin chinese editor/dictionary environment: http://www.wenlin.com/
It's really helpful to paste some Chinese into the editor and be able to hover the mouse over words to get instant dictionary lookup.
Pleco Palm Chinese English dictionary:
http://pleco.com/oxford.html
Best thing to have on your palm/phone in China.
Flash Palm chinese flash cards:
http://www.andante.org/chinese_pilot.html
This is free and easy to use... Pleco software also has flashcards.
As for books: The old standard Practical Chinese Reader series is good, but I like the newer "Integrated Chinese" by Yao and it has CDs available with listening exercises.
Also, if you have a sat dish check out CCTV9 (now free on Dish network) for their 15 minute daily "Communicate in Chinese" show... I'm encoding these to MP4 and putting them on my Treo650...
Pat
I planned on just listening to the MP3's at my desk, but it was erie talking to my computer monitor and I could never find the time. So I've been burning them to CD to listen in my car. Definitely the way to spend a long drive.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I agree. I just started Spanish I and so far I'm impressed. I was expecting it to be dumb and cheesy but it actually is quite good. The pronunciation/speaking part of it is great and is something that "Learn [language] in 21 Days"-type books don't have.
Rosetta Stone is a little pricey, though: about $150 per course. It's worth it as far as I'm concerned if you're serious about learning the language.
I married a Peruvian girl. The answer to your conundrum is that neither of you should speak the others language - I couldn't speak Spanish and she couldn't speak English. Yes it was frustrating at first, but we are now both fluent in English & Spanish. It is also very useful for our 2 year old who is learning both by default.
And certainly without a time machine, learning classical languages (which is what the article is about) by immersion is not practical. Even for modern languages immersion isn't that helpful for learning to read serious literature in that language. Many languages have entire tenses that are rarely spoken but play a major role in the literary form of the language.
You know, these types of courses do a pretty decent job of teaching the grammar and a fair bit of vocabulary too, but once you've finished any CD/book/internet course, I'd suggest a conversational class. There's nothing like being thrown into a situation where you HAVE to speak, not just read and listen, to get you effectively using the language. And if you can find a teacher that'll give you some of the culture, all the better.
A "real, live Romanian" is no doubt expert at speaking Romanian, but is not necessarily an authority of any sort on how closely Romanian resembles Latin. Furthermore, this sort of thing is a matter of national pride in some countries, which means that people believe all sorts of silly things. A majority of the Greeks that I have known were firmly convinced that ancient Greek was pronounced just like Modern Greek, in spite of the mass of evidence to the contrary, the fact that the language has obviously changed in other ways (which they know because they learn to read Ancient Greek in school), and the fact that every other language is known to change over time.
I blatantly plug POPjisyo all the time. It provides pop-up hints for reading Chinese and Japanese and allows you to play a simple matching game over the contents of sites you surf. So you can read something of interest to you and then practice with the same words.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Here you go:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German
Actually they don't carry over at all. The subject-object-verb structure is a Romance development which replaces the classical Latin complex inflection system in which word order is almost entirely irrelevant. Grammatically, the Romance languages and Latin couldn't be much further apart than they are.
Also, word recognition based on classical Latin is overrated: the meanings of words have shifted dramatically over two thousand years, so it's misleading as often as it is helpful.
If there is any one language that serves as a good introduction to the common body of Latin (and Greek) words present in the European languages, it would be Interlingua, which was specifically designed for that purpose. It's also much simpler to learn. Plus, anyone knowing any Romance language can actually understand you if you speak it!
Check out http://www.perseus.tufts.edu for an excellent online resource for classical texts. They've also got the texts hyperlinked, so when you click on a particular word you can get a dictionary entry (case, etymology, parsing the verb.
It's a great tool for learning.
Also, word recognition based on classical Latin is overrated: the meanings of words have shifted dramatically over two thousand years, so it's misleading as often as it is helpful.
Actually, more often than not the problem is that the word has been relegated to some other form, or variations. E.g. "patria" means what? "country"? How are those connected? They're not. But try "patriot" and you'll see the connection.
I speak quite well Norwegian, English and German, and I can usually read most of a latin sentence right. It is much easier to trace roots back to latin than it is to draw them from latin to current languages, simply because if you find a "reasonable" root, that is probably it (worst case you'll find none). Whereas the other way around, anything could have happened since latin was in.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is a great open source flashcard program called Pauker. I use it to learn German and like it quite a bit.
Pauker helps teach you the words and quiz you on them. I've found it to be the best open-source flash card program available.
I was a little surprised they didn't mention QuizCards , which seems at or above the level of those reviewed. It's open source, and written in Java using swing for the gui.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Hmm, my father was a Latin teacher and my wife studied Legal Latin as well, so I do have some idea of what you mean. The hundreds of little pieces of paper with Latin phrases stuck to the walls around the house, including the bathroom and toilet, over a period of many years, caused me to pick something up...
While 'Legal Latin' is highly complex in its written form, it is however doubtful that the common populace spoke Latin with all its fine nuances in everyday life.
Oh well, what the hell...
Err ... Romanian only has three cases? You must mean just accusative, dative and nominative, right? Is that something recent?
;-)
Also, while you might be technically right about Romanian not being as close to Latin, I can read and UNDERSTAND Latin MUCH better than my Italian friends. I guess that just makes me smarter. Not!
Besides, if you can read Romanian, go here http://www.dr-savescu.com/carte/ and see that Latin was the language of the people living in what is now Romania and it was the Romans that "borrowed" it.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
While not a Romanian myself, I speak Romanian and spend about six months of the year in that part of the world. I am also trained in classical philology, and have several years of experience with Latin (and similar experience with the Slavonic languages). Romanian is not significantly closer to Latin than the other Romance languages. It merely is related to Latin in a different way than them. Romanian retains a neuter gender (although it is vastly simplified) while Western Romance merged the neuter with the masculine. And Romanian has two cases, unlike Western Romance which has one, and like Latin which had several; Romanian's case system has simplified to only two cases, however, a nominative/accusative and genitive/dative.
In other things, however, Romanian is quite distant from Latin. A decent portion of its vocabulary has been replaced by native Dacian or Slavonic words. Almost all of the words dealing with love and affection are ironically Slavonic. No Roman would recognise the everyday words iubesc ("I love"), sarut ("I kiss"), prieten ("friend"), draga ("dear", "beloved"), milos ("compassionate") etc. because those are all of Slavonic origin.
The verbal system is also drastically simplified. Spoken Romanian uses only two simple tenses, a present and an imperfect. The perfect is a compound tense with the passive participle (like Italian), while the future is a bizarre compound with the meaningless word "o", or the verb "I am going to..." as Spanish did. So, in the verbal system Romanian is far from Latin. I'd say it's even further away than Spanish or Italian.
Furthermore, being a member of the Balkan sprachbund, Romanian has developed features making it closer in respects to Albanian, Greek, or Bulgarian than to its parent Latin. These include loss of the infinitive and its replacement by subjunctive clauses, and postpositioned definite articles.
Your friend may be intelligent, but he appears to lack formal training in comparative Romance linguistics, so you must take what he says about his native tongue with a grain of salt.
Coptic isn't derived from hieroglyphics, but from the Greek alphabet. It has 24 letters from the Greek alphabet, 7 letters to represent sounds that Egyptian had but Greek did not, and one monogram.
However, Coptic is a written version of the Egyptian language, as are hieroglyphics, which might be what you are thinking of.
The people at http://www.freelang.net/ make a free dictionary program that performs the flash card function it has word banks for quite a few languages. It's pretty (IMO) for a free program.
I'd gain an extra 500 words of vocab that I'd loose just as fast. For me, only words that I saw all the time really stuck.
I've been using Supermemo for the palm pilot now for about a year (mostly with my own Japanese sets), and I'm not sure the author gave it a fair try. It's not really a program geared towards initial studying like most flashcard programs. It's main purpose is solving this exact long-term retention problem--it figures out for each card the next day you need to see it such that you'll remember 90% (configurable) of the cards you see. Not sure I'd call it magic, but it's been a real breakthrough for me. And yes, of course memorizing vocabulary isn't learning a language--but it's certainly a necessary step.
In learning languages, some things are just easy - for example words similar in the new language and in the language(s) you already know, and some things are plain hard, for example words that look/sound similar, but mean different things (like arena meaning sand in Spanish), or similar words with significantly different conotations (phrase verbs in English coming to mind here - make vs. make out).
In Super Memo (and I don't know about the other programs, but the article mentions the scheduling algorithm as one of the advantages of Super Memo) you'll be shown the easy stuff once a year and the hard stuff once a week, if necessary, and it's all on a personal basis, so hard stuff for me can be easy for somebody else and the program will reflect that.
My experience with Super Memo was a very positive one and it would have continued, had my Palm not broken. 8-)
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
I think there are only 50 or so Romanian words that linguists are sure they come from Dacian. How? Albanian is a descendant of an ancient Thracian tongue, and those words can be found in Albanian, too. Of course, there are a few thousand with an unknown origin, but you can't assume all of them come from Dacian. About your statement that there are two cases, see my answer to belmolis' post. And work on your grammar - you named 4 separate cases, but you seem to think they are the same two by two, which is incorrect. We have three tenses: past, present and future, and 8 modes, so saying the verb system is symplified is at least wildly inaccurate. I wonder how your letters look like, they must be pretty funny to read :D. There are two kinds of future tense actually, future 1 and future 2. future 2 is something like "voi fi facut...".
Using "o sa ..." for future 1 is very... umm... non-literary. You can use "va/vom/vor/voi ...", which is the literary way.
I don't understand why anyone can claim that "campo" is closer to "campus" than "camp" based on the last vowel. As you know, in declension, the noun campus loses it's termination (which is nominative specific), so we have the root "camp" and for singular, for instance, the terminations: -us, -i, -o, -um, -o, -i, -e for nom, gen, dat, acc, abl, loc, voc.
:)
Romanian has 5 cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vocative and their identification is much more clear in the text than you think (a subset of feminine).
ex: baiat (boy) - (masculine, singular)
baiat - nominative (always with an article - see below)
(A/al) baiatului - genitive (a noun relates to it)
Baiatului - dative (a verb relates to it)
baiat - accusative (not always with an article)
Baiatule - vocative
If you're curious I will make further declinations for you for different nouns.
Another note, is that most of all other romanic languages have lost even more the distinction between cases, so from all romanic languages, Romanian is most similar to Latin.
Indeed, Romanian mainly holds 3 visible different forms in all the 5 cases (nom/acc, gen/dat, voc) which sometimes collapse to two (for instance in masculin plural in most of the times genitive, dative and vocative are alike) and holds 3 declensions, and maybe one of these is what you referred to from the beginning.
Regarding article, there are two types. Undefinite ("un baiat") and definite ("baiatul"), the first referring to a boy, whoever is he, the last referring to a certain boy. Please note that the Latin "unus" in romanian is "un" - the indefinite article, but also "unu" - the number "one". Also, it's possible that the undefinied article "-ul" comes from latin demonstrative pronoun "ille". Both were used in Medieval Latin as surrogates for articles, and considering that Romanian is said to be born out of vulgar Latin, you should look for referrences a bit later and lower stylistically than Tacitus
The number of latin-derived words I'm afraid is not a criteria, as you know literary English words are in vast majority derived from latin, but I doubt anyone will hold for a similarity between the two languages. It's rather a matter of how "core" are those words to languages.
For a proof of an obvious similarity between the two languages I give the following text (translated and hopefully well adapted) given by one of the Romanian historians:
The wheat (grau/granum) is milled (se macina/machinare) in the watermill (moara/mola) or is pounded (piseaza/pinsare) in the stamp (piua/pilla-pilula). The flower (faina/farina) is sieved (cerne/cernere) through sieve (ciur/cibrum) and is mixed with water (apa/aqua) and with the dough (aluat/allevatum), then is kneaded (framanta/fermentare), is shaped like a bread (soage/subigere), is laid on a wooden plate (carpator/copertorium) or under a wooden bell (test/testum) is baked (coace/coquere) in the oven (cuptor/coctorium) until the bread (paine/panis) is ready. From the wheat flower can be made also pie (placinta/placenta), from the millet (mei/milium) flower a pounded boiled specific food (pasat/quassatum). To plough (a ara/arare), sow (semana/seminare), to thrash (treiera/tribulare), reap (secera/sicilare), gather (culege/colligere), reverse the sowing (intoarce/intoquere). Wheat (grau/granum), rye (secara/secale), millet (mei/milium), barley (orz/hordeum), mountain-wheat (alac/alica). Ear (spic/spicum), straws (paie/palea), cornockle (neghina/nigellina), land (pamant/pavimentum), field (camp/campus), area (arie/area), approx. 1/2 hectare (falce/falx-cis), yoke (jug/jugum), pitchfork (furca/furca), scythe (secere/sicils). Note that for all the above verbs if you derive a noun from them (e.g. sowing = semanare) you get an even more closer similarity.