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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.
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!
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language
But as for the comparison and programs, you're on your own. This is Slashdot. "News for Nerds." Nerds are supposed to have all the answers, right?
Keep your eyes to the sky.
"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."
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
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.
>> 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.
There's an open source project doing exactly this for the simplified character set at:
http://www.adsotrans.com
Neatest feature is the collaborative backend database, which is also open source and downloadable. The Beijing-based server is a bit slow for trans-Pacific, but there is a language learning news portal using it which loads much faster. I use it as my homepage:
http://www.newsinchinese.com
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.
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.
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.