language
 

anybody here bi/multi-lingual, or trying to learn a new language?

any thoughts on the best ways to pick up a language, or reflections on the experience of trying to learn a language in general?

i got interested in mandarin chinese cause at work i always find spent cardboard with the symbols on it. at first i just tried learning the symbols... started practicing drawing them and ****, but then got interested in speaking the language as well. so now i've started doing pimsleur. i torrented rosetta stone but found it really wasnt that useful for chinese. so i've been doing the pimsleur tapes and so far i can basically introduce myself and explain that i don't speak the language very well.

i know batlord said something about cantonese vs mandarin which made me look it up and apparently both are different chinese languages. mandarin is the most commonly spoken language, and i think cantonese is the 2nd most common. there are up to like 10 different chinese languages. but one interesting thing about it is that when people speak mandarin vs speaking cantonese, the two languages are different and their speakers cant understand eachother. however, when it comes to the written form, they use the same symbols. so a person who speaks mandarin could write a letter to a person who speaks cantonese, and vice versa. they just can't speak out loud and understand one another, cause they assign different sounds to the various symbols.

I speak fluent English, good Latin, and passable French (Canadian) and German. Unfortunately I can't write in the latter two.

English is my primary language but I also spit hot fire.

Been doing Spanish for about two years now, feel like I'm not pushing myself enough but can have a conversation (just about). The reality is a lot of the time it's just gonna be tedious as fuck but if you don't really want to do it you're gonna get nowhere.

Spanish is good for me cos I have an interest in a lot of South American stuff. I do language exchange online with some Uruguayans which helps, their English is far superior to my Spanish though.

Re: Courses, I found Michel Thomas's to be the best, Pimsleur bored me to tears. Not tried RS but heard it's wank.

English to Spanish is meant to be quite easy, English to Mandarin :eek:, my mate's doing that, he said that there are no proper tenses or verb conjugations. 4 tones are used to distinguish meanings from pronunciations of the same word and 1 sound can have over 10 meanings. Then there's the writing system as well :D.

Suffice to say though, there is no easy way to learn a language and there is no substitute for living in a country that speaks it.

lol funny thing is i live in a country where spanish is everywhere, and i even have spanish inlaws that i would like to converse with, so i have all the reasons in the world to speak spanish

yet cant get interested in it

only interested in ch!nky language

cause its so alien and ****, makes it interesting

i feel like everyone and their mother speaks spanish

if i pull off mandarin i'll be one of the precious few



edit- pet_sounds would speak latin... this cracker is officially the oldest 14 year old alive

precious few billion lol... good luck.

i count the entire population of china as 1... similar to how a colony of ants comprises 1 super organism

nice attempt to rain on my parade, as always, though. you manic depressive new jersey dwelling ****

I said good luck..

If the mandarin fails I recommend trying russian. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit in high school even though I was forced into it. I even ended up competing in the olympiada my senior year.

I'm fluent in sarcasm. No really.

I learned a bit of German (sprechen sie deutsch), but it was just enough to get me around when I was there, and I've forgotten most of it. Funniest thing was when you got into a taxi, and said to go to the bar, the driver would always say "Oh jah! I take you to disco tech!". At first, I was like "No man, I wanna go to a bar", but then I found that they mean the same thing. At least it was like that in the 80's.