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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.
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.
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
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
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
"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."
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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
No, you just have to watch them along with studying. If you just spend 1/2 an hour a day 5 - 7 days per week, open-ended, working with the books, and watching Hindi movies after you build up some vocabulary, then you will start to enjoy them.
I don't have the link for it, but the Indian Government's Central Hindi Directorate has a very good Hindi correspondence course. And a real human grades you, too!
The Indian government has a comprehensive program to practically make Hindi its national language. Officially, Hindi is its national language, but not all non-Hindi states (like Tamil Nadu) like that.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just a bit of trivia, but Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic (Egyptian) Orthodox Church, is basically Ancient Egyptian written with Greek characters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.