laughter is the best medicine
A late-20s university grad living in the Bay Area with hopes of returning to the world of academia for Japanese or linguistics, or I'll run off to law school.
My obsessive-compulsions include stopping the microwave only when the time remaining is divisible by five and reading the fine print on commercials.
My first sip of tea was out of my baby bottle. I make one of the best cuppas you’ll ever taste.
Okay internet, you really have to take a look at this website. Information and statistics on every single effing language in existence.
“Overhear conversation in language you don’t speak” “Spend next twenty minutes analyzing the hell out of it”
Which Languages Are Harder To Learn.
As a native English speaker, I would certainly have to emphasize the “each learner is different” part of this post. The “Medium” and “Hard” tables certainly do NOT apply to me. Of the “hard” ones, I would leave Arabic and Korean there, but Chinese and Japanese haven’t ever been difficult for me to pick up at all. There are certain difficult parts to the languages, but there are parts of English that are difficult with English speakers as well. I would most definitely swap Japanese and Chinese with Hindi and Suomi. (I’m leaving Arabic there, even though it hasn’t ever been terribly difficult for me.)
I guess the “motivation” aspect plays a larger role with me. I’ve given Suomi a couple of chances, but before I had even three of the fifteen or what not cases solid, FuckThisShitByeth of April arrived and I was done.
That being said, I’ll probably give Suomi a third/239847th chance at some point.
Also, I based this off of written (and not really the speaking and listening) part.
Oh, and I can’t really say I’ve ever tried हिन्दी, but I have taken my dear sweet time with the letters — probably unjustly (or something) backburning it.That’s not true, because I’m only interested in Sanskrit anyway.
For all you other lang nerds. :-*
Two years after my first round, 62 points out of 150 - only 25 questions right out of 50. I did slightly worse than before.
Japanese: 41 points/150 - 18/50 questions. Consistent considering I have placed my studies on hold.
Meh… could have done a lot better.
Get schooled. Two, to, and too are NOT the same thing.
- [a surgeon from another specialty was checking her emails]
- Her: Dammit [friend's name], I don't speak Italian! This is going to take me three hours to read... I wonder if she's spamming me.
- Medical Student: You can always copy and paste it into Google Translate.
- [Cue me choking and almost having my tea shoot out of my nose]
- Me: [laughing] Sure, it'll give her the gist but she may end up more frustrated with the English that she's given [as a result].
Wayne was playing Just Cause 2 last night when Jazzie and I returned from our avoid-the-woo-cuddle-party outing. We started watching the game play and I thought that it would be awesome to become a travel consultant for gaming companies. The idea snowballed into language development when the dialect for [the fictional island of] Panau was spoken. I thought it has elements of Tagalog but I couldn’t tell if the speech pattern was SVO or SOV. My desire to work with language and game publishing skyrocketed.
I tried googling some advice but all I found was a gamer Linguistics PhD who was ripping the [made-up] language for one of the Star Wars games. I guess I’ll have to just get the advanced degree and figure it out later… :-\
I thought it was “fuck the world” as it sprung up around the same time as FML, so I was getting real pissed off that people were using it all the time - that’s rather abrasive. Why should the world fuck off because your pasta wasn’t al dente? Imagine my surprise when I found out the real meaning… Interesting. I don’t think many other people who used it were aware of what they were saying like my dad and his gen with LOL.
Canada’s on there, too.
Though not as detailed as the U.S.
If you are a foreign language enthusiast, a polyglot or just want to learn a new language on your own, you will find here:
- How to choose a new language to learn
- A detailed, hands-on guide to teaching yourself a foreign language.
- Reviews of books about language learning
- The questions about language learning people ask me most frequently.
