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Learning a Language (pg. 2)
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| Googooly |
| quote: | Originally posted by mellow_head
Google is your friend!:o |
:stongue: |
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| ::TranceVanDyk:: |
| the best advice is to live the country itself for at least a year. in one year, u can just about learn the entire language if u speak it on a regular basis everyday. but it sucks sometimes, having the feeling of being forced to speak another unfamiliar language. and u get tired of having to think about every word to say and translating everything from that language to english in your head. |
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| Googooly |
| quote: | Originally posted by ::TranceVanDyk::
the best advice is to live the country itself for at least a year. in one year, u can just about learn the entire language if u speak it on a regular basis everyday. but it sucks sometimes, having the feeling of being forced to speak another unfamiliar language. and u get tired of having to think about every word to say and translating everything from that language to english in your head. |
exactly, thats the best way to learn a langauge. but it costs money tho... |
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| MERLIN |
from what i hear in my mandarin class this quarter, it's hard for people to get a handle on the tones and the character recognition. although it can also be said that they don't study hard enough, but i can't make that assumption since i don't know all of the.
but i'd say if your determined to learn it and not just b.s. it, then you'll be ok. i speak cantonese and when i was growing up for some reason i just hated mandarin. then i ended up doing the whole chinese school thing in high school and ended up learning nothing. this past march i took a trip to china and everything seemed to turn around. i just love the language now which is why i'm going to be finishing up my quarter of mandarin tomorrow.
i personally don't think it's that hard but of course i sorta have a head start on it don't i?
enough of my rambling nonsense, heres a link
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~pinyin/ |
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| klingklang77 |
| quote: | Originally posted by josh4
i've heard you can call yourself fluent in a language when you've started to dream & think in it |
fluency is a really hard thing to define. the dreaming is a sign, thinking on the other hand kind of depends on what you are thinking. for example, what language do you do math in? if you speak a few languages, most likely you will do math in your mother language. then how can you define what you think in, b/c math is a thinking thing as well... |
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| blazed it |
do you mean Hakka? the guest peoples?
don't know how to speak hakka, but thats one of the smaller dialects. I think the 2 largest for Chinese are Cantonese and Mandarin, but I could be wrong.
Whee Cantonese has 9 tones, and it's like British English it's all slang. Good stuff.
I heard Linguaphone is good, but I can't confirm it. |
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| LinX |
je parle francais
avons-nous des gens francais dans la maison |
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| MERLIN |
| yea cantonese and mandarin are the two biggest. but cantonese is slowly dying out. i was in the freakin village area by canton and the waitresses didn't know how to speak cantonese. i can only guess that alot of people from the north migrate down south for work. only place that your 100% safe with cantonese is hong kong. |
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| DC76 |
Try travlang.com for the basics.
http://www.travlang.com/languages/index.html
Cantonese isn't really dying off, but it might be in declining usage...
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=yue
I studied Mandarin (from a Linguistics point of view) in one of my classes last year... it would be a pain in the ass to learn, but not so much so as some languages out there... the Dene languages of Canada and the USA are much harder. There are thirteen "dialects" of Chinese, and as has been said, Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese) and Wu (around Shanghai) are the largest. There's actually one that isn't spoken in China at all, Huizu, or Dungan. |
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| Noctone |
| quote: | Originally posted by josh4
i've heard you can call yourself fluent in a language when you've started to dream & think in it |
The interesting part about learning multiple languages, at least from my limited experience, is that sometimes you realise that there are certain ideas or feelings that seem to make much more sense in one language than they do in another. |
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| DC76 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Noctone
The interesting part about learning multiple languages, at least from my limited experience, is that sometimes you realise that there are certain ideas or feelings that seem to make much more sense in one language than they do in another. |
Absolutely. A grad-student friend of mine once said that it's been said, "to know another language is to possess another soul." Having studied at least a dozen languages (and retained bits), I can say, it's all true! :D
The only downside to this is when it comes to translation between any two languages... you lose some of the nuances of the original text and you also add other nuances that don't exist in it, whether it be in semantics, morphosyntax, context, or ambiguity. A good translator can minimise such changes.
(You can tell what my profession's going to be :P) |
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| MERLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by DC76
Try travlang.com for the basics.
http://www.travlang.com/languages/index.html
Cantonese isn't really dying off, but it might be in declining usage...
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=yue
I studied Mandarin (from a Linguistics point of view) in one of my classes last year... it would be a pain in the ass to learn, but not so much so as some languages out there... the Dene languages of Canada and the USA are much harder. There are thirteen "dialects" of Chinese, and as has been said, Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese) and Wu (around Shanghai) are the largest. There's actually one that isn't spoken in China at all, Huizu, or Dungan. |
yea maybe i should have reworded. i was just so amazed at how many people i spoke or tried to speak with couldn't understand cantonese. and i was in canton. i was like :wtf: that sorta gave me a little more determination to actually learn mandarin. here in the states i really took it for granted how important it is to learn your own dang language. i'm actually studying mandarin right now for my final tomorrow. |
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