/lang/ - Language Learning General

Honestly it's impressive that you picked that up.
I've spent my years there and you outdid me.

Swedish and Italian
I speak Swedish fluently but I’m trying to make an effort to acquire more vocabulary

haha le EPIK SWEDEN LE YESS meme!!

Haha

Taiwanese. Traditional is fucking hard. Their version of Pinyin is fucking hard. Their pronunciation of mandarin is fucking hard.

I mean I got 6 years before I move there but holy shit this'll be a bumpy ride

Im starting to fall out with learning german, mainly caused by boredom with the language itself and growing interest in other languages like Russian.

Help me bros, should i just abandon german in favour of what i want to do or just bite down and keep going? My study sessions have really taken a hit because of this issue

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bump

TRANSLATION CHALLENGE
>The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.
-Xun Zi quoted in: Errick A. Ford (2010) Iron Sharpens Iron: Wisdom of the Ages, p. 48.

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L'homme qui essaie de voyager par deux chemins à la fois n'attendrait nulle part

ma tentative

celui qui essaie de voyager à la fois sur deux chemins n'ira nulle part.

Ich habe Deutsch gelernt. Es ist schleckt ;_;

atteindrait*

>schleckt
goddamn it i dont even know how this word entered my vocab. i meant schwierig

je viens de me rendre compte que "sur" devrait être "par".

Du kannst mir den Pen0r schlecken wenn du verstehst was ich meine. ;=)

d-danke :3

>tfw not learning any language
>don't want to learn one
Aaaah I remember the time when I tried to learn these Asian dialects. What a waste.

why not learn another european language? you have a good opportunity in regards to your living situation, i'd cease it if i were you.

>i'd cease it if i were you.
ouch

*seize

Too boring to do and honestly quite pointless. I'd like to speak German for historical purposes but there are way enough ressources in French and English. When you speak these two languages you don't need anything else.

but if you have personal interest, don't let the "global languages" bullshit discourage you. just because the world has a lingua franca, it doesn't make learning a language completely pointless. i was learning chinese for "economic" purposes but i realised that was going to depress the shit out of me so i began learning german instead. it may not be as useful but it's actually something im interested in plus it's healthy for the brain to to be multilingual. you've got a head start being fluent in two languages already

Čovek, koji pokušava da prati dva puta istovremeno, neće stići nigde.

>plus it's healthy for the brain to to be multilingual
This desu. I remember reading there's strong evidence that multiligualism significantly reduces the risk of getting Alzheimer's.

If you move to Russian, you’ll eventually get bored with that too and get interested in Italian or something. You have to commit.

Moi ma 3 trois jours, très mauvais français

I think reading is more healthy for your brain. And more helpful in life.

trois semaines"

Help me get back to learning after a burnout.

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learning another language requires a fuckload of reading so you're not wrong

Der Mensch, der gleichzeitig zwei Weg zu fahren versucht, wird nirgendwo erreichen

i uncomfy with "zu fahren versucht"
also how often is "nirgend-" used? I've never actually seen it until looking for "nowhere" just now

I mean, reading interesting things about history, philosophy, politics, economy, in a language that you can fully understand and perform more. I like to improve my French that way.

Continuing off a post I made last thread, can someone help me decide between Swedish and Dutch as an intermediate German speaker who's looking for something on the side? Usefulness is pretty important to me so I'd consider availability of various media in the language a strong consideration

Dutch:
-More spoken than Danish, Swedish and Norwegian combined
-Already understand grammar from German and can sort of read it
-Difficult pronunciation and not a nice sounding or looking language

Swedish:
-Easy to learn as an English speaker, I've already dealt with most of the grammatical differences from English and German
-Sounds and looks nice
-Mutual intelligibility with Danish and Norwegian
-I've found more media in Swedish and similar languages than in Dutch, not sure if that's just a personal exception though

Or just ignore both for now and get German to a fluent level

>Der Mensch, der gleichzeitig zwei Weg zu fahren versucht, wird nirgendwo erreichen

Der Mensch, der zwei Wege gleichzeitig zu gehen versucht, wird nirgendwo ankommen.

>i uncomfy with "zu fahren versucht"
Apart from "fahren" being obviously wrong, "zu gehen versucht" sounds perfect for a phisolophical quote of this sort. You wouldn't phrase it like that in regular speech or wirting though. "Der Mensch, der versucht, zwei Wege gleichzeitig zu gehen..." would be the normal order.
>also how often is "nirgend-" used? I've never actually seen it until looking for "nowhere" just now
Nirgends and nirgendwo are as common in German as is "nowhere" in English. Perfectly normal, regularly used words.

>not wearing any pantsu

slut

im a huge fan of the sapir-whorf hypothesis so i like to think that learning more than language has massive implications on the way we perceive and interpret the world around us. imagine reading all of those subjects in various different languages, it may open you up to vast possibilities of different meanings

La persona que prueba a ir con dos vias en un tiempo no va en cualquier lugar. I'm terrible I know, but I'm learning.
>serbian and not croatian
Why?
But truly, excellent, the only thing I'd do is switch stici and nigdje, but that's style not propriety.

Der Mensch, der gleichzeitig zwei Wege zu reisien versucht, wird nirgendwohin gehen

Should I learn Latin?

I've previously tried to learn Spanish, got to about 40% on Duolingo (lel) before just losing interest. I've always wanted to learn Latin because I'm a big history nerd and would LOVE to read old texts in their original language. Plus, I figure, if I learn Latin then romance languages would be easier.

Is it viable?

What's interesting is to read history books in foreign languages, like the ones you get in school, to see how people perceive the world, yeah. But I think it's more interesting to go deep further your own language and study old texts you can only appreciate as a native, rather than learning other stuff you might never understand more than partially.

>Or just ignore both for now and get German to a fluent level
I would do this. Maybe you don't have to go until you're "fluent", but at least make sure your German is solid before moving on, especially since both of these languages are very similar. You don't want to be mixing up the languages.

That said, I would personally choose Swedish. My main reasons are:
>Swedish is mutual intelligibility with Danish and Norwegian (ie. 3 for 1)
>Dutch is not a nice sounding or looking language (desu it sounds like Swiss German which triggers me)

Holland looks so comfy though so i might suck it up one day and learn Dutch

>gehen, Wege
durr i knew that
>perfect for a phisolophical quote of this sort
that's why i was uncomfy.
Thanks homie

reisen*

Don't use Duolingo beyond vocabulary, it does jack shit for grammar and learning grammar is by far the most interesting part of a language

Latin is pretty interesting if you like old texts as well as etymology for romance languages, so I'd give it a shot. Also it's quite easy.

Part of learning a language, rather.

it doesn't have to be partial if you convict yourself to that language ;) but i know exactly what you mean and i agree, we could never possibly understand another language as much as we understand our native language and so it's good to truly explore and discover the shadowy places of our own language.

>I would do this. Maybe you don't have to go until you're "fluent", but at least make sure your German is solid before moving on, especially since both of these languages are very similar. You don't want to be mixing up the languages.
I doubt I'd mix them up, I'm more worried about not devoting enough time to both. I'm also at that phase where I hit a plateau and I'm not really sure what to do next besides wait for fall when I can audit some German classes at my uni

Should I use it for a starting point? Is the Latin course on there any good?
Obviously I can't immerse myself in Latin the same way one can with Spanish, for example. My ex girlfriend was Colombian, so I had a plethora of Spanish around me.

>Easy
How would you say it compares to more common Euro languages?

>easy
>7 cases

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>But truly, excellent
kek, thanks. Haven't bothered with the language in a while. I've got a Balkan trip planned for the summer, gotta get serious about it again.

>serbian and not croatian
I just like Serbia a bit more.
And I find Serbian easier to pronounce. Serbian omit a lot of the palatalization that is present in Croatian, which I'm not a huge fan of.

>Should I use it for a starting point?
You can but I noticed among other things it introduced important concepts way too late and explains them poorly. I'm and used Duolingo for both German and Swedish
With German I struggled immensely because all Duo really did was make me memorize vocabulary. It introduced genitive and past tense WAY too late and left me guessing in regards to sentence structure and grammar, had to learn all of it elsewhere. Even with Swedish which is far closer to English it didn't really explain how definite articles worked well even though they're in the earliest examples (The man eats an apple = "Mannen aeter ett aepple" and not "En mann aetet ett aepple" for example)"

>Is the Latin course on there any good?
I wouldn't expect it to be any better than non-dead languages. Regarding whoever saying Latin being easy, a big part of German people struggle with is the four-case system, and Latin has six.

7 cases senpai

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AFAIK locative is hardly considered a case. I've taken Latin classes and done research on it before and it's generally accepted to have 6

fair enough

I also got a D in the class because the teacher didn't want to fail me, so take this with a grain of salt. Didn't really give a fuck about languages until far after that

>How would you say it compares to more common Euro languages?
It doesn't compare to French or Spanish, it works differently.
There are various cases referring to the way the action or the word is used in the situation: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. Locative too but it's barely used so not worth the learning. It might seem to be a lot but they are not very different (their use however, is, but it comes quite naturally) and it will get stuck in your head quickly if you repeat them regularly. You have singular and plural forms for each one.
Then you have various noun declensions, then again most being more common than others.
I practiced Latin in middle and high school and performed quite well, as I loved to read old texts about mythology. I've lost a lot since, barely remember the cases, lol.

Just for fun, here's to be:
I am: sum,
You are: es,
He is: est,
We are: sumus,
You are: estis,
They are: sunt.

i was about to type 6 myself but to double check i went to the wiki and i was surprised to find locative. but even that says it's not used often

Especially when the aforesaid native languages are butchered a little more each day.

it's true but unfortunately that's what happens to natural languages. butchered is a misnomer, we really have to accept that languages are going to evolve no matter what, either through intervention or through time.

I don't know about English as it doesn't seem very structured, but French is really in a bad state right now.

>but French is really in a bad state right now.
Not him, but how so?

of course english is structured, it is just highly dependent on word order like chinese so it can look messy and less refined.
what do you mean by french being in a bad state?

What was expected from middle school or high school student has still not been reached by university students, grammar and spelling are disastrous, there are plenty of barbarisms, some tenses will not be taught anymore (due to egalitarianism considerations, and because they're judged as discriminatory, literally quoting this lepoint.fr/societe/et-ainsi-trepassa-le-passe-simple-19-12-2017-2181039_23.php), people pushing their own agenda by butchering the language (shittons of pronouns, "inclusive" writing, meaning gender-neutral, described as a "mortal threat" and an "aberration" by the Académie française, still continues to grow theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/03/french-language-watchdogs-say-non-to-gender-neutral-style), and it just seems like an endless fall at the point where when one speaks French properly it's considered as arrogant and forced. Not even talking about the oral language, you don't want to hear it.

When I said English wasn't "structured", I mean that you haven't your own "Académie française", your language is more flexible. But perhaps I am wrong?

hmm ok that does sound fucked. sounds like it's going the way of english, dropping cases, dropping gender pronouns, refining spelling (american english is a good example like aluminium vs. aluminum)
oh i get you. you're right, we generally don't apply prescriptive linguistics to english anymore simply because of how widespread it has become and people actually get quite offended if you correct their form of english, even if it does sound absolutely abhorrent.
e.g ending a sentence with a conjuction, using their/there/they're incorrectly, replacing the word "have" with "of" ('could of' instead of 'could have')
the 'of' thing is actually something that personally pisses me off. i simply can't comprehend how someone can interpret a contraction that badly.

> lepoint.fr/societe/et-ainsi-trepassa-le-passe-simple-19-12-2017-2181039_23.php

I had to learn the passe simple in high school.

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>the 'of' thing is actually something that personally pisses me off.
Absolutely agreed. I'm not too fussy about their/they're - it can happen to the best of us, even to those who perfectly know when to use which. Could of though? You have to make a conscious decision to spell it like that, and it makes you look like an absolute retard.

it makes absolutely zero sense. they're sounding it out as a contraction but then type it out as two words anyway. it's completely baffling.

>you're right, we generally don't apply prescriptive linguistics to english anymore simply because of how widespread it has become and people actually get quite offended if you correct their form of english, even if it does sound absolutely abhorrent.
fuck this hurts to read man.
Sorry for my mistakes by the way I know I make many but I didn't sleep this night (and I still need to improve).
>e.g ending a sentence with a conjuction, using their/there/they're incorrectly, replacing the word "have" with "of" ('could of' instead of 'could have')
>the 'of' thing is actually something that personally pisses me off. i simply can't comprehend how someone can interpret a contraction that badly.
This is impossible to understand. Well their/they're/there if you type very quickly I could possibly get it but could OF? It doesn't even make sense.

I had to learn it in primary school (lol), then we never seen it again. It's very nice to use though, and it's not even elevated language (we're not talking about imperfect subjonctive or past anterior). I use it very often in my copies and the examiners do appreciate a lot. Paradoxically, the global drop of the level allowed grammar nazis like myself to become more "highlighted" simply for writing accurately.

What languages are actually worth learning at this point? I'm having a hard time finding a country worth visiting

mate, you display much better english than a lot of the aussies i've met so i wouldn't stress at all.
indeed, it's the most bastardized thing to happen to the english language, quite a new phenomenon as well. like the german said, it unveils the person as a simpleton

any that you find interesting tb h

>You have to make a conscious decision to spell it like that, and it makes you look like an absolute retard.
no you don't. the 've in "could've" and of are homophones for a ton of people. if you're not paying attention to what you write it's pretty easy to mess up. nobody's perfect.

of course that is what's happening, but they don't even notice the grammatical implication when they type 'of' after the verb ie. the implication of it making zero sense

Yeah. And it's not even "popular" language, which has always existed in various forms, even more in the past than now maybe, it's simply incorrect crap.
Love the Australian accent, by the way.

Well if you pay 0 (zero) attention then. I don't pronounce them the same ways so I didn't get it. Is it more of an American thing? Or perhaps is it because the "have" sound is contracted?

I don't like learning about things I'll never use. I've dabbled in Polish, for example, because it's a country I like, but I don't actually have any reason to go there so I've kinda stopped. Ich kann in ein Land leben nur mit Deutsch und nur denn ich es vor Rapefugees gelernt.

>Ich kann in ein Land leben nur mit Deutsch und nur denn ich es vor Rapefugees gelernt.
this barely intelligible actually

I've came to the conclusion that I shall not learn any more language for my part.
Just read some books instead.

What's wrong with it?

>I've came to the conclusion that I shall not learn any more language for my part.

how about learning english

lol you're right, that's already enough to me.

Everything? I can't even tell what you were trying to say.

>I can only survive in a country with German and only because I learned it before rapefugees.
is what I was trying to say

Writing comes after speaking. To an English-speaker, who is not well practised in writing, it is very natural to write "could of" instead of "could've". I personally did it for longer that I would like to admit.

>relatively advanced sentence
>fucks up a pluralisation of a word borrowed from his own language

Minor error.

Okay lads, I can't find any decent resources for learning Latin (yes I read the OP).

Can anyone who has learnt Latin point me in a good direction?

there is no grammatical implication though, even when it's misspelled people still know that the "of" means "'ve". it's literally just an alternate spelling (albeit a nonstandard one).

>Or perhaps is it because the "have" sound is contracted?
this.

why would you do that

I had a similar problem. For the most part, Latin learning hasn't progressed into the digital age all that much, in fact you could argue it hasn't progressed much from the 1950s.

You are going to have to use books. Lingua Latina or Wheelock's Latin.

mega.nz/#!F3glTBCD!2ZrWNr-DN-o0L-JGUpURehGAXs_kqoeobhZaKBuCkEk

I have kindly uploaded it for you

Thank you user, God bless.

So, how does one go about learning from a resource that doesn't have any translations?

You have to learn with the "natural method". Look in the margins, look at the context. It is not easy but it works.

As the main reason of learning latin (a dead language), is to read old texts, this method makes the most sense. You can use a dictionary if it helps.

>I learned it

stretching it lad