linguaphiles | *taps mic* Is this comm on?

taps mic Is this comm on?

I've been looking for a still-active languages/language-learning comm on DW & don't seem to be finding any, alas! (If I've missed one, please let me know.)

In the meantime, in my own journal I got a little excited recently about language-learning, useful websites, techniques, etc. I would love to have more people joining the discussion -- here (if this comm wakes up? *hopeful look*) or in my journal... ?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've been too busy with Chinese/Sinitic languages, Russian/Cyrillic-based languages, Latin/Greek, and Farsi/Hebrew to contemplate linguistics as a whole. @_@

Your link collection is exciting! The feng shui suggestion makes me laugh. Thank you for it, since it is helpful for straying polyglots.

Heh, yeah, I don't have any brain room for linguistics in general; the little brain space I have is being applied to learning French/German at the moment. Wowwww your language acquisition plans sound terrifyingly immense! Do you try to work on them at all once (I mean, I guess, are they all active right now, do you do a little bit on each of them each day, or do you sort of rotate periodically)?

I'm glad the links were helpful! \o/

French is connected with Russian, Latin, and Greek, so when Tolstoy writes about, say, Anna Karenina saying something in French, it pops out of the Cyrillic EXTREMELY clearly. Then being a Romance language is the Latin part of how French and Latin are connected, then Greek spelling paradigms are confusingly similar. @_@ French is regarded as the elite language in Russia, though I've only forced myself through a few French drills in the past.
Then my mother's German helped me vaguely understand ein kleine Deutsch...
I have this sense telling me is right, but I can't parse why only kleine has an e at the end in a little bit of German, though I think I've heard both eine and Deutsche... it probably has to do with the declensions, but I'm just about to take a victory nap after securing my own copy of Доктор Живаго. By Boris Pasternak. *sleepy laze* Here's a little English summary of the plot.

I have grandiose aspirations, or at least I might be able to understand more than three-quarters of my books in a few years. Maybe.

Welcome! I read here but haven't posted in a long time. (Reply delayed because I just got back from holidays.)

Two things I like to do when I'm learning languages:
1. Read children's picture books, and try to get the gist of what's going on with the pictures and the text without looking up too many things. The context of the pictures helps me figure out what the text must mean. I don't try to use a dictionary/grammar to understand every single word; I just get what I can and move on. I might look up a few things if I'm curious. The tricky part of this is finding picture books to read. Some libraries have them. There's a website I used to use ( https://www.biguniverse.com/read/books ) that had free picture books online but they seem to require an account now.

2. Read a book that I'm already very familiar with in English. I know the Lord of the Rings very well in English, so I like reading it in other languages because I already know what it should say, so when I read it in another language (again, without looking up very many things or trying to puzzle out all the details), I know what it should mean so I can figure out what the other-language text must be saying.

(& now my response is delayed due to having been on holiday!)

Oooh, yes, reading something familiar is a good tactic! I haven't done it w/books, precisely, but when I was studying Japanese I was getting to the point where I could start to read manga in the original. It helped that the ones I tended to read used the same few framing sentences to open each volume, so it was easy to recognize.

I've found picture books difficult in the past b/c sometimes they seem to use either slang or rather old-fashioned words, but I should try again!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

taps mic Is this comm on?

Hehe!

Re: Hehe!

Literature is pretty in just about any language.

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