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Old 04-29-2014, 02:27 PM   #26
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Anyone know anything about or speak any Patois?
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Old 04-29-2014, 02:43 PM   #27
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I don't think you really need knowledge of Patois to go to Jamaica. Most people speak English and Patois, I'd imagine. I don't think there's even very much education in Patois, as opposed to other creoles like Haitian Creole.
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Old 04-29-2014, 02:45 PM   #28
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I don't, but if I can get away with picking a little up before I'm there I'd like to.
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Old 04-29-2014, 03:07 PM   #29
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Like I said, I'm not sure there's many resources for Patois. It's a lesser-known creole, which is already a much lesser-known classification of language as it is.

Good luck either way!
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Old 04-29-2014, 05:29 PM   #30
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I speak Chinese and Greek, although I'm pretty bad and can only manage basic conversations and texts. I also took two years of French but I'm not good at all
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Old 05-09-2014, 12:52 PM   #31
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Hoo i can speak french, latin and some language youve never heard of.
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Old 05-09-2014, 06:52 PM   #32
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I don't speak any language except English. I took Spanish in school, and while I could resurrect something more than conversational Spanish, I've found little use for it.

My mother actually discouraged learning another language (she speaks four) because Filipinos desire their kids to have "perfect english accents". The ironic result is I have a really terrible mush mouth and trouble enunciating things in English, but when I speak German, Spanish or Japanese, I can so so accentless (in my opinion). I believe this is a property of how my tongue developed, because when I was going through puberty, I deliberately tried to mold my tongue and throat to counter-act the hormone-induced physiological changes. For example, my voice only dropped a step from before age 12 rather than a full octave because I trained it, and I can sort of approximate how I used to sound as a child. But I can't pronounce things in English as well as I did as a child.

Specifically, the word "God". When I was a child, I could enunciate this very well "Go-duh" but now it comes out as "gaw-duh". It's really frustrating for someone who only speaks on language but doesn't know enough in the others to sound decent!
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Old 05-18-2014, 12:42 PM   #33
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I speak Portuguese and English only. I learned English with games actually, whenever I saw one new word, I'd search on internet its meaning in portuguese and see the translation. This happened for almost 2 years if I'm right. I never had English class nor had someone helped me, so I'm completely self taught.
I have tried to do this with Spanish, which should be easier for me, since Portuguese and Spanish can resemble each other fairly well, but odd I couldn't. Next year, probably, I'll have to learn English officially though.

My vocabulary is also very limited, but I'm trying to expand it by reading more.
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Old 05-18-2014, 03:41 PM   #34
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Gonna pop back on this thread, as I've started learning Portuguese since I last reported, and have made significant improvements in my French language skills, both in vocabulary and pronunciation. So much that I'm actually contemplating an internship at Normandy.

While on that vein, I'm still studying Japanese, but lately, I've had this really, REALLY big desire to learn some Nordic language or another. I'm looking into getting started on Swedish, but the complicated yet melodic mass of words and agglomerated syllables that is Finnish is... Strangely interesting and appealing to me (Even if the roots of the language are COMPLETELY different from any of the other 3 languages spoken in Scandinavia, and is by no means intelligible with Norse, Swedish or Danish for that matter). Anyone got any tips on which to learn and how I should get started?
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Old 05-18-2014, 04:18 PM   #35
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You should learn Finnish because that's what Tolkien did to take a break from studying for finals in his undergrad. (not joking, btw)

I am taking German for reading knowledge this summer. German is much easier than Latin and Greek.
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Old 05-18-2014, 05:34 PM   #36
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German has got to be one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. It may not look it but it really is, it was easy for me to do the reverse anyway. German and English are so similar it's not even funny.
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Old 05-18-2014, 05:34 PM   #37
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Aurion, answer me one thing? Are you finding it easier? I had some friends whose native language were English, and most of them had some problems with my language. Specially with accentuation and the verb 'you' (você). Even though some of those had a fairly good Spanish. But for me, English was easier and the language which most "resemble" it, in terms of grammar and such.
But I'm curious... Do you find it easier to learn Portuguese and do you feel it resemble English regarding some rules, wording, etc?
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Old 05-18-2014, 07:56 PM   #38
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Akanjão View Post
Aurion, answer me one thing? Are you finding it easier? I had some friends whose native language were English, and most of them had some problems with my language. Specially with accentuation and the verb 'you' (você). Even though some of those had a fairly good Spanish. But for me, English was easier and the language which most "resemble" it, in terms of grammar and such.
But I'm curious... Do you find it easier to learn Portuguese and do you feel it resemble English regarding some rules, wording, etc?
Quite frankly, I find Portuguese to be rather easy to learn, mostly because my mother tongue is actually Spanish, and I have had proper training with French. Accommodating to the differences in pronunciation and grammar is easy, since they're mostly the same. Now, from the point of an English speaker, I can see why it would be difficult to get used to the whole issue of accents and the peculiar way of pronouncing certain things, such as the "u" sound at the end of words with "l", as in "Brazil". As far as particularities in grammar and rulings are concerned, I see it a lot more closely related to Spanish, as you'd expect. To put it differently, that's how I study it, or at least, that's the technique I use.

In response to Amras, do you know or have any experience with the Finnish language in general? Or know what way would be best to tackle the hefty process of learning it? At least, for one thing, I know that it is a lot prettier than Swedish, to an, extent, until you meet the heavily agglomerated words amounting up to countless syllables.
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Old 05-18-2014, 08:25 PM   #39
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In response to Amras, do you know or have any experience with the Finnish language in general? Or know what way would be best to tackle the hefty process of learning it? At least, for one thing, I know that it is a lot prettier than Swedish, to an, extent, until you meet the heavily agglomerated words amounting up to countless syllables.
I have a friend who took it in grad school because she works on Finnish history. It has something like 42 cases (!!!), and is pretty inscrutable... I've asked her what book she used, and will let you know what it is when she responds.

Are you at a uni right now? They may have the books you need, because Finnish is a specialized study, so the books will probably be expensive for a student to buy on their own.

She said: "It's light blue and there is a girl with a black shirt on the cover"

.... yay?

EDIT: Further info from her: "The book is all in Finnish. Without an instructor/lessons, it was damn near useless. Honestly, best bet would be to find a good website."
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Old 05-18-2014, 08:39 PM   #40
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Originally Posted by Amras.MG View Post
I have a friend who took it in grad school because she works on Finnish history. It has something like 42 cases (!!!), and is pretty inscrutable... I've asked her what book she used, and will let you know what it is when she responds.

Are you at a uni right now? They may have the books you need, because Finnish is a specialized study, so the books will probably be expensive for a student to buy on their own.

She said: "It's light blue and there is a girl with a black shirt on the cover"

.... yay?

EDIT: Further info from her: "The book is all in Finnish. Without an instructor/lessons, it was damn near useless. Honestly, best bet would be to find a good website."
Now this is interesting. With the aforementioned information, I'll do my best to locate the book. When I find the title, I'll let you know.
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Old 05-21-2014, 03:40 PM   #41
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I just said I was relearning German in a job application, should probably get back in to it!
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Old 08-03-2014, 05:27 AM   #42
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Ok so if I were to hypothetically work on it everyday, using textbooks and audio courses, talking to native speakers and watching or listening to ,dubbed and/or subtitled media, how long would it take to learn Mandarin? Are we talking a decade? One or two years?

The motivation is a girl so hopefully I'd have some motivation lol.
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Old 08-03-2014, 07:37 AM   #43
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Learning spoken Mandarin will take you maybe a year and a half with decent enough study. Learning written Mandarin depends on how good you are at memorizing squigglies.
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Old 08-03-2014, 07:42 AM   #44
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A year and a half, you think? Is that basics, conversational fluency? If I did ever manage to pull it off I'd want to progress to business standard.

Written Mandarin looks terrifying.
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Old 08-03-2014, 08:07 AM   #45
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Year and a half is probably conversational level, business fluency might take longer. Spoken Mandarin has very straightfoward rules and conventions and the vocabulary is pretty simple in its construction. You'll probably spend a good chunk of the time learning getting down tones and learning to distinguish them.
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Old 08-03-2014, 08:48 AM   #46
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Ok. Can you recommend any particular resources?
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Old 08-03-2014, 09:09 AM   #47
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For anybody who intends to learn a language, I recommend using Duolingo as a resource. It is intuitive and fantastic for burning time spent sedate on a computer. Also, you can get the app for your smartphone. It was named best app of the year by Apple for a reason.

Currently, it should offer you courses in Latin American Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch. I picked up a vast majority of my Spanish through this program, an asset which aided me when I needed to travel to Argentina last year.
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Old 08-03-2014, 09:57 AM   #48
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For anybody who intends to learn a language, I recommend using Duolingo as a resource. It is intuitive and fantastic for burning time spent sedate on a computer. Also, you can get the app for your smartphone. It was named best app of the year by Apple for a reason.

Currently, it should offer you courses in Latin American Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch. I picked up a vast majority of my Spanish through this program, an asset which aided me when I needed to travel to Argentina last year.
Yeah, I heard so many good things about it! Just... booooooo for being limited only for teaching those languages...
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Old 08-03-2014, 10:18 AM   #49
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Yeah, I heard so many good things about it! Just... booooooo for being limited only for teaching those languages...
My understanding is that the program works by translating thousands of webpages into English and vice-versa. The process is timely, and when I was first accepted as one of the beta-testers, the program was restricted to strictly Spanish, French, and German. Right now, they have an English for Chinese Speakers program, and once that is completed, Mandarin and Cantonese for English Speakers will be rolled out. It's quite a smart program, and although I'd like to see more languages beyond the Eurocentric ones, its current array (especially French, German, and Spanish) are very well integrated.
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Old 08-03-2014, 10:33 AM   #50
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Crowd-sourced translation of the Internet sounds like it's going to be fraught with errors. Better than Babelfish or Google Translate, sure, but still.

Also, I think it's rather telling that the application isn't for everyone when most users quit using it in under two hours. (Source: the Wikipedia article you linked) I also don't know that I agree with the claim that 34 hours with the app rivals a college semester. In terms of short term memory, yes but only for the most intelligent people. In terms of long term memory, no. Like, not 100% declaratively no, but I don't believe most people will really retain any language instruction learned in five days (7 hours a day making 35 hours total) nearly as well as those who learn it over sixteen weeks (and a sum total of roughly 130 hours according to the study). Two hours a day every day for sixteen weeks will "always" beat 34 crammed hours, air quotes acknowledging exceptions.

That stated, "don't knock it 'til you've tried it." Would be interested to see how quickly I could recover my four school years' worth of French with this app; or, put another way, would be interested to see how far I get in just 34 hours. Does the iPhone app log your time spent with it? That'd be ideal.
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