Learning another language...

[sggg]

Everything Melf said is very good advice.


Also, he reminded me of a joke that I once read in a lingistics book:


Q: What do you call someone who speaks 4 languages?
A: Quadrilingual.



Q: What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?
A: Trilingual.



Q: What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?
A: Bilingual.



Q: What do you call someone who speaks 1 language?
A: An American.






When I told that joke in my French II class at university (in NJ) no-one laughed except for the professor, who laughed quite a bit.

[Hero]

from personal experience, I would say textbooks are the next best thing to a class. Be sure to get the corresponding workbook...if it's a good book to study from, chances are there will be a workbook and even an audio tape/disk to get.

[arjue]

I would love to learn a language, but I doubt I could apply myself hard enough to become fluent. Also, I have no idea what languagge I'd like to learn. Russian would be cool i guess, or Dutch...

What are the most common languages? If I remember correctly, its english, french, and mandarin, but I could be wrong.

Hey sggg, I remember in my earlier days, my french teacher said that "le" and "la"meant that something was masculine or feminine. What decides what gender is attributed to something is in french?

[Melf]

I don't know about French but in Spanish, "la" is feminine (singular) and "el" is masculine (singular). I'd imagine it's similar.

The gender article was something I found very tricky to learn in Spanish. My brother once told me that the majority of words ending in the letter "o" were masculine. When I learned Spanish, I found that this isn't always true.

Anyone know if it's similar in French?

[Adrian]

My mother is French and my dad is English so i'm bilingual through this. I'm now doing a 4 year course for Japanese (~12 hours of lectures a week) and French (3 hours) at university so I do enjoy languages. I could never learn out of a book though, I need to be in the country or have classes. Incidently my brother is learning Korean, heh.

[sggg]

Originally posted by arjue
What are the most common languages? If I remember correctly, its english, french, and mandarin, but I could be wrong.

it's Manderin, English, and Hindustani: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html

French is #10.

Hey sggg, I remember in my earlier days, my french teacher said that "le" and "la"meant that something was masculine or feminine. What decides what gender is attributed to something is in french?

It's pretty much random and this goes for most languages with genders. Often times there are general rules or guidelines to help you remember.... but there is no reasoning behind why one thing is fem and another is masc, and I think that's what you are asking.

Some languages like German have a "neuter" gender as well.

[arjue]

hmmmm, so if I was to invent something called, say, a bort, would I get to choose if its "le bort" or "la bort"?

[basemies]

Originally posted by sggg
Uhoh.. bad news.

Finnish is known as the most difficult language in the world to learn. It has something like 14 cases and things like word-order don't matter because the words change so much depending on the case. It's ridiculous. It's a beautiful language.. but it's supposed to be crazy-hard to learn. Not impossible though!

Finnish is a unique language and it is in the Finno-Ugric language family. The well known only language that is similar to it is Estonian. Barring that the only other major language in Europe that is even slightly related is Hungarian/Magyar (another anomoly), and even then it's only on an achedemic level and not a practical one.

Most of the other languages in Europe are in the Indo-European family which means that they are not that different from each-other. This includes Swedish, German, and English. So, Swedish and Finnish could not be more different in spite of their proximity and shared history (and yes, you are right that Swedish is an official language in Finland). A quick example in the difference between the two languages can be seen in the different place names in the two languages:

Anyway, if you go for it I wish you luck! I'd love to learn Finnish one day myself because it's really cool and interesting.. but I'll just bee happy to get Swedish down pat!

i'm 100% finnish and i went to salolampi, the concordia finnish language village for 3 years, once for two week twice for a month. the immersion factor really helped, i was thinking in finnish after a while. i was able to learn incredibly simplistic finnish, and how to use most of the cases for a lot of words.

suomi is finland
suomea is the finnish langauge
suomalainen is a finnish person
mina olen suomessa means i am in finland
mina menen suomalle means i am going to finland

there is also weird consonant gradation, such as:

helsinki is the city of helsinki
sina olet helsingissa means you are in finland

there are also weird endings like ko that make verbs a question

menemmeko helsingille? means we go to finland?

but a lot of words changed so much that i couldn't understand them. the concordia language villages are great places if you are 18> and want to learn a language, but finnish is pretty hard as far as learning languages go. don't let the difficulty scare you away from learning finnish, it's a great language. you can ask me things about it if you want, i forgot quite a bit but i still have all my old notes and worksheets.

[Ace]

German is not that hard to learn if English is your mother tongue. Both languages originate from the same family. When learning, I suggest you hang-out with the German community for a while, try reading German books. If you have the time and money, stay in Germany for a while (I'm sure the latter is a sure-fire way to learn).