Slashdot Mirror
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.
URL please?
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."
And not a single of them are accessible since there's not a single link to the comparison anywhere in the write-up.
Great job editors!
Wikipedia has a pretty good, though short, article on the Akkadian language.
Egyptians long ago gave up the Egyptian language and started speaking Arabic.
UmmRa most likely means one of the Ancient Egyptian languages, probably Middle Egyptian.
I would, but I don't speak Arabic.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
the slashdot editors can use the software to learn english?
Learn 313375P34K
You have completely missed the entire point of the story. Bravo!
Was it difficult to learn? The language barrier is the only thing that has stopped me travelling to phpedia.
Dead Languages I was once fluent with:
Pascal
Paradox
DB-III
68000 Assembly
Countless Application specific scripting languages and APIs
more entertaining than badly written software, anyway.
Subtitles are your friends.
..don't panic
Considering the grammar and spelling travesties on Slashdot, not to mention the execrable comprehension of story headlines, summaries, and TFAs themselves, this pseudoliterate community is the last place to ask that question.
--
make install -not war
I wonder how many posts we'll have about the non-content of this article...
You are seriously full of s*** if you believe that you have learned anything in 6 years out of those 3 languages. I am not sure about the 3rd one but both Latin and Egyptian are quite hard to learn an people spend 6 years on each of them before they make bold claims like you. Plus most people DONOT use software for learning a foreign language because all the software is incompleate and has a lot to be desired in terms of teaching principles and the information provided. While all printed material has gone through an editor (or many of them) software usually gets audited for programming errors and very little for content errors (compared to the time spent on programing ones). So while software might be the best way to build up a momentum in learing a foreign language it is by no means the way to go once you have passed the first couple of months and gained that momentum. The local library is there for a reason, you know ...
Well, I've always wanted to question some of you technically knowledgable guys (pun possibly intended) about how you learn languages! Good thing I jumped on this topic early, or I would never have even had the chance of having this answers (thanks to a weird commenting system, but I'm not complaining.)
Anyway, let me get to my question. I want to learn Hindi, but what I've tried from Rosetta Stone to Pimsleur seems relatively weak. Well, the Pimsleur stuff is EXTREMLY good for a small introduction, but it isn't quite comprehensive enough to gain the understanding of the language you need.
Anyway, I can't seem to find any other good locations to learn this -- and I was hoping one of you might have the insight to answer this question. Gratzi!
Where are the links?
timothy what are you on?
If you're looking for a free and cross-platform way to learn modern or biblical Hebrew, check out FoundationStone: http://foundationstone.com.au/
I'm currently trying to learn Japanese and I really find it helpful that Slashdot has turned into a blog so I now know there are a few programs which will help me, but I don't know what they are..
I like muppets.
The first thing anyone needs to learn is English! Slashdot is a fine example, but let's not go into that. How many times in a day do you hear people saying "I did good...", or even worse "I ain't"? So, let's perhaps see an article on how the digital age is allowing people to re-learn English?
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
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.
What about rosseta stone software for learning a language. It says that is the method used by the diplomatic service in US. Maybe is not a panacea... maybe is just a survival kit... anyone here used this particular software?!?! a comment?! a review?! a rant!?
I'm trying to learn German. I decided to learn right after my schools add/drop date. Can anyone point me to a good web resource to learn? I found German for Travellers as a good resource, I learned how to pronounce the letters now but that's only the first step. To get to the advanced part of learning on the site, I'd need to subscribe for $16/year.
Talk about a slow news day.
"Why yes, I do know Akkadian. Listen to this: xlsdke didue sdkfjhds dudys dk,d! I just said may your ancestors live a thousand years, thus confusing your family reunions no end. Prove I didn't just say it."
from the my-excuse-is-laziness dept.
UmmRa points out his discusses 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."
---
I think we've all been duped. This isn't a crappily edited post. It's actually an ironic post! Didn't you notice? It's from the my-excuse-is-laziness dept.!! What a clever joke! lol@our expense!!!
PS - "points out his discusses"!!!
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.
Actually, learning Latin is a pretty good idea. It's a base for many European languages, and the subject object verb structure matches several more languages not based on it (and gets English speakers used to forming and reading sentences in this structure). Having a good Latin vocabulary will let people studying Spanish or French or Italian recognize words that used Latin roots, and the grammar concepts do carry over some.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
immersion
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The editor added the note, so was it the editor that removed the link?!
or else!
Not to forget Latin America.
Sprite through the nose... ahaha...
:-D
/me Wishes he could mod you up.
It's hillarious, words cannot describe the pain of laughter I recieve from seeing such a professionally made website describing "leet speak"... and being so incredibly serious about it.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Sorry, can't resist:
Latin's not dead; it's just Roman around.
I've studied dead Greek, but have also studied Mandarin, Thai, and Lao. Those have allowed me to live, study, and work in several foreign countries. In fact, I was a linguist for the US Gov't, and, believe me, if computers worked effectively, they would be used more in language teaching.
IT in language learning is really popular in the same way that audio-ligual labs were big in the 70's-80's. They can help some, but they don't create any real language ability.
In fact, I'm even studying IT in ESL/EFL education right now, and I'm still a little cynical about just how much it can help. Drill is useful, but you eventually have to move beyond it to real communication, and that's where forums and whiteboards work well, but then you need other humans to communicate with...
Put identity in the browser.
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...
They get paid for this? Seriously?
Oh I see he tried to fix it. Well, at least he got two out of three. Third time's the charm? Too apathetic to care?
All joking aside, that really is the best way to learn a language. I had taken two years of Russian and two years of Spanish in High School by my Junior year, but I could barely form a coherent sentence in either.
The summer of that year, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Spain with close friends, and by the end of our first day in Barcelona, I had learned more functional vocabulary than I had in those two years of studying. I was nervious at first--trying to follow those ridiculous scenarios in Spanish books when we stopped at a bar--but once you realize it's communicate or isolate yourself, it becomes second nature.
Active use, especially in a situation where the other party doesn't have your primary language to fall back on, is a great way to learn; unfortunately, I'm not sure this applies as the poster has an obsession with languages that nobody speaks anymore.
-----
jonathan barket
There's a linux program called memaid:
http://memaid.sourceforge.net/index.php
Pauker is a java program:
http://pauker.sourceforge.net/
I've tried sort of half-heartedly to get memaid to work, but I didn't have a lot of luck. I didn't push, though, and I didn't post any questions on the mail list.
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
As someone who's studied both dead languages (Latin and Old English) and one live one (French), I can safely say that learning a live language is NOTHING like learning a dead one.
To learn a live language, no amount of flash cards will teach you, you need live people and live conversation. Otherwise all you can do is read and write.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
No, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian are quite different from Latin. Romanian is almost exactly Latin.
Oh well, what the hell...
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I use a program called flashkard for KDE, but my biggest gripe is not being able to find many prebuilt datasets. It can get tedious making thousands of your own ones. I'd buy well put together sets of datafiles, but not the programs to display them...
Well, I took the Central Hindi Directorate course, so that's why I recommend it. A couple of dictionaries would help too. Father Kamal Bulke's English to Hindi dictionary is good for contemporary Hindi. "A Practical Hindi English Dictionary" (Hindi to English) by Mahendra Chaturvedi is also very good.
Alternatively, you might want to try snooping around Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan for elementary school books on Hindi. (Again, I don't have a link but I suspect they have a huge website.)
Right now I'm working on learning Sanskrit, a not quite as dead language as some others mentioned here. (In India you can still get the evening news in Sansrkit over the radio.)
Huh? Phpedia? I believe it's Lehrdorphia.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
This sounds facetious, but there's something to it. (Other than the obvious fun, of course...)
:-)
I am in the process of learning Spanish now (one year of formal study and counting), and I have asked several people who are fluent in more than one language the best way to improve in a non-native language.
Surprisingly, the most common answer by far was "Get a girlfriend who speaks Spanish but little or no English." The rationale (which makes sense, when you think about it) is that I would be a lot more motivated to learn the other language if it's necessary to communicate with someone close to me.
I've observed this anecdotally. I have a buddy who married a girl from Chile. She speaks fluent Spanish and English, and was somewhat familiar with English before they got married. At this point, he knows very little Spanish.
They have a couple friend, a guy from New York and a girl from a Spanish-speaking country. He is fluent is Spanish and English, and was someone familiar with Spanish before they got married. At this point, she knows very little English.
We were all having dinner one night, and I commented on it. They all said the same thing: The person who is bilingual is generally the person who is more familiar with the other language to begin with. Once that person is bilingual, the other person gets lazy to the point of not really bothering.
I guess I need to find a girl who knows exactly as much English as I know Spanish.
Conoces a alguien?
So when s/he talks about learning 3 dead languages, s/he learned to read 3 languages, probably also by learning some grammar.
When I talk about learning a language, I mean learning to speak in a language and being able to understand others speaking...put the two together and you're talking about a conversation. That's not something you learn from flashcard programs. The way you successfully learn languages, meaning speaking and aural comprehension, is by engaging in conversational practice after preparation and study with things like flashcards and audio materials, or computer programs.
And you do that by living in the country, taking a class, or both. There is a world of difference between studying dead languages and studying living languages.
Rosetta Stone is brilliant! I'm currently using it to learn French.
The interface is intuitive - you don't need english explainations for everything, which is helpful because you don't need to switch between languages in your head while learning.
What really impressed me was that after 1-2 hours of completing the first course, I was *thinking* directly in french. Many other courses will teach you the language but you may end up thinking first in english and converting / translating it to yourself in your mind.
I'm well impressed and highly recommend it.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
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.
For Latin, I find that words for Linux helps.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
Not to mention more than 100K English words being borrowed from Latin.
So in a nutshell what he's really saying is:
.00003USD for a million?
Flash Cards Are The Best Way To Learn A Language.
and they're what? like
This
Hey I thought Mumm-Ra was that weird guy from the Thundercats cartoon series....
Oh wait... he said UmmRa... umm nevermind...
How I did was brute force, using the Breen dictionary site and various on-line Japanese new sites. I'd find an article, and read it. Words I didn't know, I'd look up. Then I'd read another article and do the same thing. Over a year, I had built up a good vocabulary. I was working a Help Desk, so believe me, I had nothing but time to keep looking up the same word over and over until it stuck.
I wrote my own flashcard programs (one in JavaScript and one in VB) that brought in audio and pictures. Unfortunately, this method (for me) was not long term effective. 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. Pictures, audio, etc., although nice, didn't seem to add much to my learning effort. Just straight and constant reading and watching TV and looking up words is what did it for me.
The hardest challenge is crossing the line to real fluency and reading novels. I can get through the newspaper fine but can't get past page one of a novel yet. The reason is all the words that every Japanese person knows that only show up rarely in written material (English is the same, how often do you say "ermine", "demarcation" or "orbital insertion" in conversation?). I've gone back to the flash cards for words of this type.
In short, there's no magic to learning a language. It is a grotty, tedious, intense and rather lonely project involving memorization, dictionaries and lots of time.
Windows and Mac flash-card programs are a bit inconvenient because they run on Windows and Mac machines--not exactly portable.
For about $100, you can get a Palm, and there are plenty of flash card and language learning programs for that.
However, I would also disagree with the statement that you shouldn't bother with CDs. In fact, in my experience, while you should do some reading, most of your time should be spent with tapes/CDs. If you don't focus on learning the spoken language before you attack the written language, you will likely end up with a horrendous accent.
Foreign language-only drill-tapes are the best ones, I find (like those from Barron's). If some company shipped them as MP3s, that would be even better, but converting them yourself isn't hard.
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.
Well, that is what a real, live Romanian told me. Maybe another Romanian cares to comment?
Oh well, what the hell...
Sure, most language software is next-to-useless, but the market slants heavily towards very basic learners. So even if you have a good program, the material it covers is likely to be so basic as to make it ineffective at actually teaching the language.
That being said, some ways of doing things work. If you're still studying Mandarin, for instance, you might find the following site useful. Great for building up vocab, while the highlighting improves one's ability to rapidly parse Chinese text mentally:
http://www.newsinchinese.com
I've used Pauker in the past and found it to be a great flashcard program. Free, opensource, and runs anywhere you have java.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
Hardly. Romanian is by no means "almost exactly Latin". For example, Latin had seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative - the last residual) while Rumanian has only three, and only a subset of feminine nouns distinguish all three, and then only in the singular. Latin did not have articles. Rumanian has articles attached to the end of nouns. As far as vocabulary is concerned, if anything Rumanian words resemble their Latin ancestors less than in languages like Italian and Spanish. Look at the loss of vowels in final syllables as seen in Latin campus becoming Rumanian camp, where the vowel (in a different quality) is retained in Italian campo. Rumanian has also borrowed quite a few words from Slavic languages. Rumanian is conservative in some respects, in retaining more of the case system, for example, than other Romance languages, but overall it cannot be said to be consistently more conservative, and it certainly isn't almost the same as Latin.
Pauker tries to match to memory models, so you first 'learn' cards for the short term memory cycle (i forget how long that is, no stupid pun meant here). And then you get quized on those words. Pauker follows some kind of exponential memory model, so as you successively get words right, the time before they expire again increases exponentially. For quizing, you can set it so you either type the back of the flashcard, or you acknowledge that you got the card right. You can decide which side of the card to test.
The good : Pauker can use Unicode, which is a must for basically any language besides English. I was one of the few in my spanish class that consistently got accents right (for some reason my teacher didn't count accents too much, go figure).
Using the exponential memory curve, you don't have to waste your time consistently quizing words you know well.
The bad : sometimes it's annoying to deal with the preset 'learning time' cycles for new cards. Pauker has a certain 'memory philosophy' built into it, so if you don't want to deal with that philosophy it can be a pain.
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Also he's a warmonger wingnut! That is all.
None of the program compared are free
/.).
Maybe this guy should spend his time learning English... (like most people on
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
Rosetta Stone is very attractive to beginners because it seems so easy -- why learn grammar when you can just listen and click on the picture? Except for the problem that people are lazy. It is just too easy to cheat from context. For example, a typical question in Rosetta Stone is listening to a voice say "This is a red car" in a foreign language and then having you click the picture of the red car. But the other pictures may be of kittens, boats and frogs. If you know the word for "red" or "car" you can easily get the right answer without understanding the full sentence.
And nothing beats really learning grammar. It's tedious, but just as there isn't a royal road to geometry, there isn't one for languages.
That was brilliant. Thanks.
I hate that.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Some people like to learn by example and build grammar on later.... I'm not one of those. I like to have the syntax hammered out before I even learn a single word. (I am currently taking a course in linguistics so I've got a got good base for a base)I know it's not for anyone but thats what works for me. I was wondering if anyone could point out a good resource/series/collection/book etc for people like me. In particular I want to learn Welsh but I have interests in exotic and rare languages in general such as basque, manx, and native american languages.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Here's the story of how some dude learned French in a year.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
I really, really hate Slashdot sometimes.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
But I've since come to realize that now I'm really glad I studied a living language, because I can actually use it.
Additionally, if one learns a living Romance language, they will also be able to identify most of the same common Latin roots. Is there really much of a benefit, if this is your goal, to study Latin over French/Spanish/Portugese/etc? The other languages give you an appreciation into another existing culture. And it is really cool to be able to talk to people in a new language that a mere few months ago you'd be entirely unable to talk to.
So after living in the real word for awhile, I'd only recommend Latin to people interested in studying the classics, history, or linguistics.
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Would Arabic flash cards help?
I have some flash cards for Uzbek up there, too, if anybody is interested.
Paul
http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~prrodrig
I would recommend Pauker -- it is probably the best free flashcard system around -- it keeps track of when you last answered a flashcard correctly, so that you don't fall into the trap of learning a series of words and then forgetting them afterwards.
Bah, the hell w/ programs, find some chick (right, right, "opposite sex") who speaks the language and start hitting on her. If that doesn't get you to learn the language incredibly quickly, then no software is going to help...
[o]_O
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.
iFlash sound like a Pron website containing martigra /spring break/girls gone wild pictures?
Damn the man!
I was moderated troll, woo-hoo!
In my experience, most communication defaults back to English due to its dominance in the engineering, entertainment, computer, etc., domains.
Being able to think in a non-native language is difficult, but once you get used to it it's not that hard to do.
A core list of commonly used words is a useful thing to have for a new language. Most language courses seem to have around 2000 words that they focus on, although these lists are usually proprietary. The only public-domain list (in English) I could find is here that could be a starting point for anyone interested in assembling a list for their favorite language.
So I studied a bit on my own (and with her), took one semester at university while I had spare time, etc. The best part about learning with her is that she helped me to perfect my pronunciation (well, not perfect, but definitely way better than most Americans). We speak 99% in English, because it gets too frustrating for us if I cannot understand what she's saying. But with her family I speak Spanish. I've also made friends with a whole group of Spanish speakers (from Spain and Latin America) which gives me extra practice too. I've found that most Spanish speakers usually encourage you to speak the language, even if you're bloody awful at it.
But I'm really glad I did this, because Spanish is becoming ever more prominent in the states, and I highly recommend Spanish to any American. I wanted to learn Spanish for some time, and she was the push to get me off my ass to learn it.
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Saying that Egyptians just decided to "give up" Coptic and start speaking Arabic is as offensive as saying that Native Americans "gave up" their lands and languages and "decided" to start speaking English.
For a history, see copts.net.
The Korean language has some similarities to Latin, if you can believe it. First off, the most basic sentence structure is subject-object-verb, secondly, you know which word is the subject or object based on the suffix that the word has. eg, "The man talks to Sam." vs "Sam talks to the man." In English you keep the same word, and change the sentence order around. In Korean and Latin, theoretically the order could be kept the same, but the words "man" and "Sam" would have to be altered with different suffixes to show who's talking to whom.
After this the differences start to show up -- the Korean language is populated with many more suffixes than Latin and they're used used all over the place, also as clause endings or honorific indicators. That can be a pain, but at least in Korean you don't need to know thirty different forms (single/plural * gender (masculine/feminine/neutral) * five aspects of declension) of an adjective to use it correctly.
Does anybody know how to say "shit" in 5-6 languages?
Take your pick:
Swearsaurus
If the language is dead, there can be no problem with copyright!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Just a bit of trivia, but Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic (Egyptian) Orthodox Church, is basically Ancient Egyptian written with Greek characters.
Yea, there are no "Egyptians" in Egypt anymore. They're all Arabic.
:)
Good people, if a little strange
(seriously...the concept of a line is lost on them)
It's for Linux, I think it comes with Fedora Core. Helps you with Latin forms, as I recall.
In the beginning, the language as actually spoken by a native speaker will occur so fast it's hard to catch it. And especially so in a movie where you cannot see the speaker's mouth clearly. But with the English subtitles it is amazing how many words you already knew in the sentence but just didn't catch.
The cool part about this is that your brain sort of already understands what's being spoken, because your eyes see the words. So you don't have the tendency to translate word by word, which you otherwise would (and most people advocate against word by word translations once you move beyond the elementary level). So at first you can focus on catching the primary words in the sentence to match up w/ the translation. And later on you can catch finer details of seeing conjugations and other tenses, etc.
One problem that would seem to be a hindrance is that very often the subtitles don't match exactly the audio, even for the same language. But sometimes this works to your benefit because even as a beginner you can often hear deviations that occur. But since you have the basic idea of the translation it makes it easier for your brain to pick out the deviations.
For example, while learning Spanish, I was watching some dumb movie with Spanish subtitles and English audio, and after a question with an obvious YES answer the guy replied "Is a frog's ass watertight?". But the translation was "Is the sky blue?". And you'll be amazed, even at an elementary level, when you can find even less subtle discrepencies between the translations.
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...sex--the universal motivator. Nothing forces one to learn faster than the notion of being dumped by an intensely hot companion who can give sweet, sweet love (and lessons in German) all night long.*
not speaking from experience
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Immersion definitely the best way.
I took german for four years in high school and learned a lot of words, but the grammar never stuck. In college, I was in an intensive program taught entirely in german, with two class sessions per day, 4 days/week, plus a special room outside the dorm cafeteria where we went out to have lunch in german (every day). Between homework, lunch, and class, we were probably spending 5-6 hours/day in german.
We also put on a play in german (and it became a regular thing that they've been doing for 20 years now in the program), so that added another several hours. The cool thing about a play is that you end up memorizing all sorts of sentences combined with acting them out, so both the structure and the meaning stick. Singing along with Einstürzende Neubauten is a great way to get a good accent.
After all that, when I went to germany for study abroad, I could carry on a pretty good conversation and do fine in class.
Now I have to learn french without the advantage of all the intensive program stuff, but I do get to spend several weeks a year in Montreal (yeah, it's funny french).
Dude, have you gone mad?
... you also have to decipher the language she's talking it in.
If you try to learn a language from a chick, not only would you have to decrypt chickspeak
That's waaay too difficult man. Not to mention you'll be misled about what the hell things mean.
As someone who has learned three dead languages in the past six years (Latin, Egyptian, and Akkadian)
Ok pal - where are they hiding the Stargate?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I'm writing a Mono program that's imaginatively called gflashcards (screenshot). The webpage is pretty junky and the program isn't al that great right now, but I've been putting a lot of work into both and there'll probably be cool new versions of them in around a week.</plug>
If you want something a bit more complete right this instant, check out granule
It seems like a waste of a computer's potential to display random strings of text for a user. With modern development in language education, shouldn't computers be able to do something special? Something to take advantage of what they do well, rather than displaying black on white text.
I've been collecting Latin /. sigs (including the above) in my journal, along with my feeble attempts at translation.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
More dirty hippies. I've advocated exiling our misanthropes for a while. Europe seems hippie friendly and ours whine incessantly about how much they hate the US, so why not give them a free ride over there. They could finally get around to building that socialist, agrarian utopia they all want.
That is, if they're not too stoned."
Like people in the US don't get stoned? So does a socialist, agrarian utopia sound so bad then? I doubt he's ever been to Europe. And if he did, he spent the whole time moaning that the food/people were different.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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
For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!
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 remember watching an old episode of Millionaire back when Regis Philbin was still the host on ABC, instead of Meredith Viera on the syndicated version. There was a contestant in the hot seat who said he worked for the military (I believe it was the Army), and he was a blonde, blue-eyed fellow who said he was a Farsi translator. So Regis asked him how he learned the language, and he talked about how they studied it for 8-9 hours a day for 4 years in a row. I've always been curious as to if that's all it would really take to fully learn a foreign language or two. Imagine if, instead of going to college for four years to get a degree in this or that, and having to take general requirements for a year out of those 4 that had nothing to do with your major - imagine if, instead of that, you could spend 4 years fully immersed in a language of your choice. It would be the only thing you'd have to study, but you'd have to do it all the time. And four years later, you'd be as fluent as a native speaker in whatever language you'd chosen. I wonder if that's how the CIA and NSA train their people.
My digital rights don't need management.
I started self-teaching myself Latin a few years ago (now abandoned.) As part of the process, I wrote a Perl program that could generate random sentences, each sentence in both English and Latin.
The state of the software is very crude, and I never got past present-active-indicative, but if anyone cares to pick it up, I can slap a GPL on it and toss it to them.
Here's some sample output. The sentences could be made a bit more sensible if more care was put into the word lists and sentence forms. (And yes, there are probably some errors in the Latin too.)
I love your greedy angers.
tuas iras avaras amo.
The gate sees the life's sons to the gate.
porta portae filios vitae videt.
I am a gate.
porta sum.
You give ancient sailors with a Roman field.
nautas antiquas agro Romano datis.
We satisfy my greedy male friend.
meam amicum avaram satiamus.
I am a poet.
poeta sum.
We save your Roman boy.
tuam puerum Romanam servamus.
You conserve ancient monies with a greedy number.
pecunias antiquas numero avaro conservatis.
You owe ancient fatherlands with a great boy.
patrias antiquas puero magno debetis.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Oh ok, shouldn't have said it then, my bad ;)
For those who prefer paper flashcards and know LaTeX, I would recommend the flashcards package. It will generate high-quality flashcards and is highly configurable, plus LaTeX usually has fonts installed to handle all kinds of languages. Typesetting foreign languages become even easier with the latex-unicode package. If you are in a university setting, you can make good money by drawing up flashcards for yourself and selling copies to your classmates.
Well, I can give you some more anecdotal evidence: A few years ago, a German radio station broadcasted the news in Latin as a lark. They got a local professor to translate it for them. After two weeks, they stopped, thinking that the joke must be wearing thin - then they got a lot of phone calls of people asking that they please resume the news in Latin! It turned out that there were many Romanians, Turks and Greeks that enjoyed it, since they could understand Latin better than German.
BTW, the Romanian I referred to is an engineer and quite well educated and can speak several languages - including Latin. So, I tend to believe her statement that Romanian is almost exactly Latin.
Oh well, what the hell...
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.
What's wrong with studying both a living language (or several) *and* Latin? Is studying a dead language detrimental to the ordinary man? You'd be surprised how much Latin involves the students in the real world. Study comparative Indo-European linguistics, of which Latin is a part, and you'll find yourself part of an international team of scholars, travelling all over for conferences, and knowing people from all kinds of places.
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...
I'm learning Hindi, and I've found a few computer programs that work okay, but I rely on learning from books, watching Bollywood movies, and talking with my co-workers from India (those that do speak Hindi).
I think that the older methods work best, just because constant immersion and practice help you retain what you're learning.
In short, there's no magic to learning a language. It is a grotty, tedious, intense and rather lonely project involving memorization, dictionaries and lots of time.
To be blunt, if your only tools are memorization and dictionaries, then you'll never reach real fluency. Languages are living things, and the only way to comprehend them is to talk with living people who use it.
Okay, maybe that's overstating it a little. But speaking with natives will help you much, much more than any amount of staring at dead trees or computer monitors. I spent my first year of Japanese study taking university classes and playing Japanese RPGs (with a dictionary at the ready, of course). Then, in my second year, my teacher introduced me to a native Japanese living in the area, with whom I practiced Japanese conversation once a week--later expanded to more people and more days. I don't think it's a coincidence that my Japanese skills skyrocketed during that second year.
One other thing I might point out is that you can't become fluent in a language as long as you're mentally translating back into English; you have to comprehend the language as-is. (How do you translate the distinction between the first-person pronouns "watakushi", "watashi", "boku", and "ore"? Short answer: you can't.) As long as you stick with reading materials, you'll always have the leeway to stop and think, so unless you have pretty strong willpower, you'll always be thinking in English. With conversation, however, you don't have that opportunity; you have to be able to think in the language to hold your own in a conversation--which in turn means that as your conversation skills improve, so does your overall fluency.
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
Unforutunately, I don't think a computer can ever beat a teacher (whether that's a peer teaching you or a classroom instructor). Language is a relationship between people and its almost impossible to pick that "one-sided" (tapes, even shows and things).
I'm a Japanese minor, speak Bengali and English at home, and while many of my friends have been native Japanese people who come over for college, I don't feel prepared for my study abroad over there next year. I know the experience however, will improve the naturalness of my speech.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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.
Because you need to learn a dead language before you can start your own country and make it the official language.
what sig?
To feed your brain.
You'd be surprised at how easy it can be to spot propaganda wen someone unnaturally twists a word for political reasons if you understand the root of that word.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Offtopic, but I really find the passé simple (the narrative past tense that you likely encountered in Flaubert's work) incredibly beautiful.
It's true, though, that it is rarely (read: never) used in day to day speech.
If you read Molière, you'll find the various examples of past forms of the subjunctive mood. Not common today, to be certain -- but very pretty.
I doubt it carries over that much. I learned French instead and already that helps quite a bit looking at Spanish, Italian. And as a bonus, French is still a living language unlike Latin.
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.
If you're going to be needlessly touchy about "offensive" words, then I should point out that it is "offensive" to say that Islam was "invented".
Would you use that term for Christianity, or would you use "revealed" or "introduced" or some other term that doesn't rudely imply that the religion in question is a human creation, and not the product of genuine divine inspiration.
People in glass houses, etc.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
100-200 years ago, the language of the learned people was French, not latin. French was the language spoken by kings (like Czar Alexzander in Russia) and educated. I think latin died around the time the Bible was published in German by Luther, some 500 years ago. Nobody spoke it or used it except the church.
But I've since come to realize that now I'm really glad I studied a living language, because I can actually use it.
I agree with you. I wasted time studying latin because I thought it would be useful for the SAT's or knowing more about english. 100% BS is what that thinking is. I learned more about English learning French. Latin is a waste of time. I would go as far and say it is a waste for people in the sciences to study it. Learn a language you can use, that you can meet people with.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Well, here's a funny twist: I have a few Japanese video game books, and I wanted to know what they say. So what did I do? I could have paid out my ass and gone through the useless hassle of a language class, I could have read one of those "Teach Yourself Blah Blah Blah in 20 Days" books and still not gotten anywhere, or I could just decode it with an online dictionary and a program called JEDict for the Mac, which swiftly looks up Hiragana.
The best way of doing these things is to go straight to the point, which involves knowing what people are writing and saying, not setting in a classroom and shoveling out money.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
You're both wrong - it's Phpiladelphpia.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
I have to plug my freeware (source code downloadable) flash card program, it offers yet another "smart learning system" to optimize study time.
e is the latest beta.
It also does pictures and sounds, Unicode, and compiles for Windows, GTK and MacOS X, and is quite popular on download.com.
http://www.wadeb.com/cuecard/beta/CueCardSetup.ex
Looking for Linux / Mac package maintainers btw.
-Wade
that's the best way to learn new languages I find.
Oh, yes, this is a very real danger. An acquaintance of mine once tried to show off his "Japanese skills" to me. As he started talking in the feminine mode, with plenty of the affected speech patterns so typical of ojou-san types in anime, it didn't take me long to divine the origins of his "skills". The clincher was his consistent use of the soft feminine wa to terminate sentences.
Learning by rote, i.e. parroting the phrases you hear in TV or films, is no substitute for actually sitting down and learning the language - in all its idiomatic splendor.
Of course, if you do know the language sufficiently well already, there's a lot of practical experience to be gained from anime - just be careful. When the subject comes up in conversation, I usually point out that you don't want to learn Japanese primarily from anime, any more than you want to learn English from Looney Tunes cartoons. In real life, nobody says "I thought I taw a puddy tat" - except as a joke, of course.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
If you are talking about a line of humans (as in waiting in a line), note that almost all mediterranean countries are like that.
Vtrain runs perfectly in Wine, so even linux users can use it.
One frustrating thing is that it's got a huge amount of very bad documentation, both from its inventor and from various enthusiasts. I've had a hard time understanding a lot of its features (and it has a lot of features) because there's no clear description for most of them, despite massive efforts to write them. Supermemo seems to be based on that Asimov/MENSA mindset that says that you understand something if you can regurgitate lots of crap about it. I prefer the Richard Fenynman mindset which says that you understand something if you can explain it clearly.
All religion could be seen to be "invented" depending on your viewpoint.
Would that be the same "revealed" or "introduced" that the christian white man used to oust the native americans from their land. So yes *I* would use that term for Christianity
I have to say that that's a pretty hot site, and I've thought of doing something similar in English. Sadly, my Mandarin training is 20 years old, so I can't do much in it anymore.
Put identity in the browser.
I dont think I would spend the time to learn another language, but the roots do help... In spelling and knowing words without actually knowing them
- gentle introduction
- several courses
- vocabulary drills
- user community
- chat, forums, message boxes
- exams
- music/songs in Esperanto
- and much more...
Furthermore, it is constantly in evolution. Going through the introduction just made me want to learn Esperanto. Gxis!In case someone is learning Arabic, I've written a little program that helps you conjugate the first stem of Arabic verbs. It's GPL so don't worry about me. Here you go: http://cocoa.sprachwerker.de/programme.php check out the fa.ala.zip.
I'm a die-hard fan of real flashcards.
.jar and upload the whole thing to the phone.
While working in Germany, I wrote my own simple Java flashcard program. I found there were many opportunities to study when I couldn't pull out my laptop (on the bus/train, while waiting for a friend, etc.).
I then wrote a program for J2ME, so I could quiz myself on my mobile. That worked better but it was a bit of a pain to deal with uploading new 'cards' (I'd have to modify a text file, put it in a
These days, I can almost always be found with the day's stack of 40 cards (10-15 new words and some 'problem words' from previous days). Writing new cards is easy (especially now that I've moved to Japanese) and dealing with subsets of cards is even easier.
The benefit of the computer approach is that I could create virtual flashcards: both programs would generate and translate random numbers/times/phrases.
Yeah it's proprietary but it really is the best way to talk to native speakers of whatever language it is you are studying. And if you are a native English speaker there are tons and tons of people who would love to improve their English.
This article was poorely researched and contains numerous inaccuracies. I was one of the first developers of FlashCards on the computer and have followed most of the suites out there - which are purely tailored to the actual needs of students, at best. VTrain And Supermemo have clumsy user interface and just imitated many of the already existing programs out there. Most importantly, they are WAY TOO expansive.
Yes, shameless plug time. I developed this program as a student and made it work best in a real environment. Check out Virtual FlashCards (http://www.virtualflashcards.com). We carry most of the features these other suites do, a much better statistics and study engine, plus a better UI and a much cheaper price. The program is Shareware but you can use it indefinitely. Unlike these other guys, it was made to primarily help people study - not make money.
Enjoy!
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?
belmolis, how familiar are you with Romanian? We have 5 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative. I should know, I'm a native speaker of Romanian. Saying Romanian is almost like Latin is stupid. It resembles French a lot more than Latin (if I remember correctly, 20% of Romanian words come from Latin, 40% from French, including but not limited to lots of neologisms). We have a lot of words from Slavic, too, also from Turkish, etc. Some of the words are strikingly similar to counterparts in vulgar latin, but that's because we didn't have contact with other Latin peoples since early in the Middle Ages.
Good for you, cassidyc, but the question wasn't asked of "you"-in-general, but specifically of michaelmalak, the original (and obviously "un-geek-ly" religiously biased) poster - who used the term "invented" for Islam in the first place.
As a geek first and foremost, I abhor religious closedmindedness and double standards - and that post of his exhibited indications of both.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
I like Vocabulary Wizard. It's one of the most popular teaching tool at download.com. It's an addware, but you can get rid of it easily. See the user comment. ;)
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.
He's talking about lines of blow, and he's wrong, because in fact coke has a long history in Egypt and may have been enjoyed by the Pharoahs.
-Dan Q.
Oh wow. Tack a link on there, and it all makes sense. Too bad I didn't get modded funny. :-P "Programming language flash cards? That doesn't make much sense... And you PAY for them? Sheesh." I feel like a choad.
I also enjoy learning languages, but the Flashcards I found the most useful are the traditional paper-based ones. I can take those with me and read while I'm in the subway, waiting on a line for something etc. I scripted a program to automatize a little the process, you can check it here.
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.
I should have also highlighted that the oppression continues to this day. See my blog story Egyptian pro-Christian pro-democracy activist sentenced to 7 years -- page 15 of Wash Post.
wanting to improve my german, i found some old used berltiz
:D
:-P
tapes from 1958 containing six hours of graduated conversational
german - digitized these into mp3 files, and i just play them
on endless repeat on my ipod.
over the course of three months, for each itteration,
i find i keep filling in more and more of the words
as i keep coming back to the same parts on the tape.
i keep repeating until i catch every single word
without missing any - the more effort you put into
trying to say the words you hear also helps.
for reading - the best thing was peter hagboldt's
graduated german reader - they have stories with a
several hundred word vocabulary, and each chapter
adds in a dozen new key words, with definitions in
the footnotes for each new instance. the graduated
nature of these readers helps a lot, because it uses
a core grammar, and then introduces the new words
gradually as you're getting used to using the words
you already know. --if you can OCR, or find digitized
versions of one of his texts, you can download it
into a palm pilot, and practice reading with a text
editor.
there are no shortcuts to learning a language.
there is no technological solution. but using an ipod
with endless repeat on some good audio language content,
or using a palm pilot to read practice texts
can help facilitate the process.
the next step is to set my google news page to german...
hab ein guten tag!
john.
Does anyone have any advice, tips, tricks, or books/software recommendations specifically for a beginner trying to learn Russian?
Sir Richard Burton - NOT the actor, the one in the 1800s, who was there when they were digging up Troy, and Ur, and the other ancient, pre-Biblical cities of the Middle East, spoke something like 17 languages.
His dictum was to move to the country, and take a lover who spoke no English.
Obviously, it worked....
mark
I have a German Collegue here in Germany who married a Japanese woman. They met in Ireland in an English course. They both now speak fluent English and going further with your point, he knows little Japanese, and she knows little German, although they now live in Germany. I asked him which language do they speak to each other in, and he told me English. I just find it interresting that a married couple speaks to each other in a language other than either of their mother tongues.
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
For what is worth, I learned Esperanto almost wholly online, it was a few months of learning before I actually talked to someone else face to face. It was amazingly easy. Resources to do so abound. It was also a great mind exercise.
Well, so long as we're all giving our $0.02 here, I'd say "invented", "revealed", "introduced" are all three both offensive and, more importantly, INACCURATE words to describe the genesis of our so-called "modern", salvationist religions.
... :^D
Terms like "perpetrated" or "inflicted" or "committed" or even "wreaked upon" would be far preferable, if you ask me
No, you misunderstand. The bunny gets replicated *through* the virus. "Fixing" the bunny is of no use. This is completely asexual bunny reproduction. Merely being in the same room with a message that is infected with the virus puts you at risk for being infected, and for producing cute bunnies from unexpected places (which places we'll not discuss here) as a side effect.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
I was a phpilatelist phpor a while in Phpiladelphpia.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
All he said was that he was teaching himself to read Japanese. He did not say anything about building speaking, listening, or writing skills (which are all somewhat different).
My other first post is car post.
Whilst a flashcard-based approach will work with vocabulary (I wrote a simple one many years ago for the Amiga when I was travelling to new places a lot) it won't help with grammar (you still need to learn the basics the old fashioned way) or pronunciation (you need to hear people talk for that).
So, assuming that you're not talking about dead languages and that you can't visit to immerse yourself in the culture, you're best off grabbing whatever text / spoken media you can find - and on the Internet, it's everywhere. Many countries have streamed radio of one sort or another - low, middle or highbrow, take your pick. In addition to language specific newsgroups the likes of Wikipedia support many, many, languages.
Anyway, the wikipedia article has almost nothing about language conflicts in India, so here's my supporting evidence:
As drafted, English ceased to exist as an official language (on par with Hindi) in 1965, after which it was intended to continue as an "associate additional official language" until such time that a duly appointed committee can decide on a full-scale transition to Hindi, based on a periodic review. However, due to protests from some states like Tamil Nadu where there is low Hindi penetration, the "twin language" system is still in vogue. Due to rapid industrialization, and a bustling multinational influence in the economy, English continues to be a popular and influential means of communication in the government and day-to-day business, and moves to replace it have effectively been shelved.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
There are only two cases, but together they perform four functions. Most reputable grammars of Romanian describe the nominal system thusly. All of the grammars in my library do so.
Spoken Romanian has only two simple tenses (present and imperfect), and a whole bunch of compound tenses. Latin, on the other hand, has a great deal of simple tenses and few compound tenses. Therefore, at some time in the past Romanian simplified the Latin verb system and then created its own system with compound verbs.
Yes, but both are compound tenses and neither makes Romanian any closer to Latin, which had a simple tense future.
The idea that Albanian is a descendent of Illyrian is still a hypothesis resisted in many circles.
No, I'm certainly not trivializing studying Latin, that's why I said I'd only recommend it to someone if their interests were for classics, history, or linguistics. That certainly fits the bill for your mention of comparative Indo-European linguistics.
What I was referring to were people taking it in high school in order to boost their SAT verbal scores. But for that reason I think it's pretty lame, because studying Spanish or French would give a similar understanding of common word origins, yet also allow one to learn about and interact with another culture.
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Oh, and congrats on the newspaper reading! People studying Romance languages have no idea of the difficulties involved with kanji.
All religions are invented IMHO.... Man still isnt evolved enough to understand the true concept of God, if he even truely exists. And do you really think he wants to hear your whining?
Sigs are for wimps
I use a free software program called VocabWorks to use KoineGreek, but it also includes modules for several other dead languages and users can create new modules. The website is http://www.aireville.fsnet.co.uk/vocabworks/
- http://www.davemackey.net/ - http://www.daveenjoys.com/
Like I shown in a reply branched above in the thread ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143147&cid=119 97860 ), in romanian are 5 cases which only by their look collapse in 3 (in some cases 2). In your enumeration, your forget the vocative, which has a different termination ("copile", "baiatule", "fato", "omule", "vanzatoareo").
What you called decent portion is however puzzling me. The amount of Dacian words is somewhere less than 300 (there are plenty of works in this subject, unfortunately they are mostly hypothethic and they also confront with a lot of words of unknown etymology), while the slavonic words cover significant but surely not the majority of the vocabulary. Relating word's origin you may review the same message I mentioned at the beggining of this message where I showed that a striking majority of agricultural terms have latin origin. With a bit of history, you'd see the relevance of this fact, as in the north-danubian area, the civilization after Roman's collapse was mostly agricultural. Some other terms regarding love and affection are Latin (a dori - to wish, dor - missing dolus, a pupa - to kiss pupare, amic - friend amicus, imbratisare - hug im+brat+is+are brachium) so your love-and-affection list is obviously tendencious, but probably is given by your insufficient knowledge of the language.
The spoken romanian uses more than two tenses. For instance in past tenses, beyond imperfect, it has two types of perfect. The simple perfect (fusei/fusesi/fu etc) and the compond perfect (which you mentioned). So by first strike we have 3 tenses. The other past tense is "more than the perfect" which is (fusesem/fusesei/fusese etc) - again a simple tense, that makes for 4.
The "meaningless o" is in fact a collapsing of a modal verb (to wish - "a voi"). It's hazardous to call meaningless things you don't know or understand.
The definite article exists in the medieval latin (see my same post from above). The replacement with subjunctive clauses in romanian it's a matter of synonimy. I can say as well "nu e greu sa fac" and "nu e greu a face" (first with subjunctive, the last with infinitive). If you're in the field you may also consider the famous Eminescu's verse "E usor a scrie versuri cand nimic nu ai a spune" (it's easy to write rhymes where's nothing to say).
Your affirmations about language corelations (for instance Greek-Romanian stronger than Latin-Romanian) are unsound.
As I have written before, most reputable grammars treat Romanian has having morphologically only two cases that serve four functions. Granted, there is the vocative, but the grammars I have treat that separately as a limited exception.
The simple perfect is but very rarely used in the spoken language outside of Oltenia.
Obviously the "o" has an origin like all things, but it is now idiomatic.
No, it's a matter of Romanian joining with Albanian, Greek, and Bulgarian into the Balkan sprachbund. See Daniel's The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Really? Than why has so much work been done on the Balkan sprachbund? For I have not said that Greek-Romanian is stronger than Latin-Romanian is all things, but in two very basic matters Romanian has adapted a Balkan nature in common with Greek.
Do you have any training in comparative linguistics? Most of what I have written in these posts matches what is in the standard handbooks.
The book referenced above is by by Joseph, not by Daniels. Sorry for the mistake.
"As I have written before, most reputable grammars treat Romanian has having morphologically only two cases that serve four functions. Granted, there is the vocative, but the grammars I have treat that separately as a limited exception."
... ... than ...".
;)
Vocative is a specifical declension case, and I wonder by what criterion is it removed from our Latin-Romanian topic, or treated as an exception. And I also wonder if the same grammars exclude vocative from Latin language narrowing it to 6 (or 5 cases - depends how they regard locative). Because the point is if the Romanian cases prove an increased likeliness to Latin not if someone can tendenciously minimize them to mock the language.
"The simple perfect is but very rarely used in the spoken language outside of Oltenia."
You are wrong on this issue and give me a stereotype from some prejudicial literature. The perfect simple is symbolically from Oltenia as there is used for almost any past tense, but it's used significantly also in southern Transylvania (like transylvanian expressions are used in Oltenia), also in the western side of Muntenia. Even more, the perfect simple is used in the literature, but also in the common language throughout the country to give a certain "load" to a phrase (e.g. expression "fuse, fuse si se duse" - pantha rhei or "it was, it was and it went away").
I notice that you ignored "more than perfect" tense. However, if you sum them up you will end up with 4 (four) distinct simple verb tenses, which makes Romanian closer to Latin than you claimed.
"Obviously the "o" has an origin like all things, but it is now idiomatic." It's same idiomatic like a modal verb in a shorter version. English, for instance, uses a lot of short forms. But under no condition is meaningless.
"No, it's a matter of Romanian joining with Albanian, Greek, and Bulgarian into the Balkan sprachbund. See Daniel's The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive, Cambridge University Press, 1983."
I expect from someone which counterargues against me (as a romanian speaker and aware of the grammar) to quote a referrence to romanian grammar. Infinitive can be freely replace with subjunctive in those particular expressions and I surely don't think the author you mentioned knows better the Romanian language than Romanian academy and 23 million speakers! A language is given by the speakers and eventually the institution they chose to represent them not by a book at someone's choice who wants to get an upper hand in a virtual debate.
That free replacement in a dictionary is usually called a synonimy, hence my previous conclusion. My advice: read Romanian grammar, read Romanian dictionaries, read academy's rules regarding Romanian language and then we'll have a common ground to talk on.
"For I have not said that Greek-Romanian is stronger than Latin-Romanian is all things, but in two very basic matters Romanian has adapted a Balkan nature in common with Greek."
Well, scripta manent
"Furthermore, being a member of the Balkan sprachbund, Romanian has developed features making it closer in respects to [...] Greek, [...] than to its parent Latin."
I don't see any corelation with any two particular matters, just a general statement: "closer to
"Do you have any training in comparative linguistics? "
The relevance of this being? I don't have anything to brag about. A linguistic training is not much of an argument when someone jumps in a debate about a language he doesn't know (words, etymologies, grammar). Also, is useless when someone knows what he is talking about. So, if we sum up, linguistic training is almost never to be brought up as argument.
"Most of what I have written in these posts matches what is in the standard handbooks."
That is of absolutely no relevance as long as it's wrong. I can't tell if it's your interpretation or if it's the books, but certainly I'll be sorry if it's about the books
This is a reprehensible nationalistic statement. Western scholars are just as capable of tracking the diachronic development of Romanian as any inhabitant of Romania. Joseph, for example, is well respected for his work on the Balkan sprachbund. To discount his work because he is not Romanian is not appropriate. If you will only accept arguments about Romanian by Romananians, then there's no point arguing with you, since you are incapable of discourse in an international context.
I think you miss the issue. It's not about the development, but about the reality of the spoken language, of the actual grammar of Romanian, which I think no one can counterargue, it's best known in Romania, by Romanians.
The fact is that in today Romania both the grammar and the spoken language offer two types of the subordinate clause you were talking about. By subjunctive and infinitive. I'm almost certain that the author(s) you quote, in their Balkanic comparative studies, took the subjunctive as an argument from "balkanism", which they are correct in. But as it's not the subject of their book, they didn't issued, and probably not researched, the clause introduced by infinitive, which represents the Latin heritage.
Maybe in a far future, the infinitive introduced clauses will disappear (it's actually a bit harder to pronounce it, because of the specific infinitive particle "a" which disturbs the coherence of speech, they are seldom used even nowadays), but as we speak it still exists and it's a living proof of the closeness between Latin and Romanian.
Please note that not the author himself is discounted, but the author represented by you and your interpretation and the fallacious calls to authority. You were wrong in several accounts about Romanian language, though you claimed linguistic background and you brought referrences. If your linguistic background or your referrences are responsible in anyway for your arguments, then they are wrong, no matter how respected are they in other places. But as I already said, I hope it's not about them.
Que tenga un buen día!
(Utah version)
Hanging out with a couple of Italian friends, I stopped channel-flipping at a Romanian news broadcast on the international feed because I at first thought it Italian. I speak some Italian and could recognize some words. Italian friend #1, from Puglia, said he could understand what the broadcaster was saying. Italian friend #2, from Abruzzo, at first said he understood nothing. After pressing him on this, because even I could understand occasional phrases, he watched more intently. After a few minutes, something clicked and he was able to give a running translation. He said it almost resembled an Italian dialect -- the occasional word that he didn't know but easily understandable from context.
She is fluent in at least 4 languages...
Oh well, what the hell...