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Posted: 10/13/2006 2:04 AM
Post subject: Learning Languages
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Maximus
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
This is REALLY off topic, but it's something i've been into for a long time. I love to learn new languages, and two that I've been interested in for a long time are Finnish and Swedish. I've looked into Rosetta Stone and Berlitz, but seeing as there's a good sized Norwegian user base here, I'm just curious if you guys have any suggestions or recommendations as to a good place to start? I've already got French and Hungarian (and some Italian and German) under my belt, but I don't think these form much of a base to help. I know this won't make me a better metal frontman, but it can't hurt :P
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Posted: 10/13/2006 2:43 AM
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Fabian
Former player
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 1711
I thought there were way, way more Swedes and Finns than Norwegians here. Anyway, I have no idea where to start. Good luck though.
Zoey Ridin' High <Fabian_> I prett much never drunk
Posted: 10/13/2006 2:53 AM
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Maximus
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Thanks ... guess I shouldn't generalize until I know more about geography too :P
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Posted: 10/13/2006 8:32 AM
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Brushy
Former player
Joined: 11/13/2005
Posts: 1587
If you want some challenge, Finnish and Japanese are the hardest languages to learn for non-natives. If you really want to learn Finnish, best way to learn it is the University Of Turku. But I doubt you want to move to Finland just to learn the language :P
Posted: 10/13/2006 9:32 AM
Post subject: Learning Finnish
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
About learning the Finnish language… Knowing Hungarian might be useful at grasping some of the concepts of the Finnish language, as well as a minimal portion of vocabulary, considering that those languages are (very) distant relatives. Knowing German, French or English does not help. Swedish helps a bit with vocabulary, but not much and not with grammar. Here are some online resources I found regarding the Finnish language. Don't know if they're any good for sustained learning though. - http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=25831 - http://www.transparent.com/languagepages/finnish/finnish.htm - http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/Finnish.html - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language I can also personally help with Finnish or other languages that I know, but usually for my help to be useful, some fundamental knowledge and understanding is already required. I can best help by answering questions that arise from learning.
Posted: 10/13/2006 10:50 AM
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Maximus
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Thanks a lot guys. (Kiittää te erittäin hyvin?)
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Posted: 10/13/2006 10:54 AM
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Maximus wrote:
Thanks a lot guys. (Kiittää te erittäin hyvin?)
= It thanks, you very well. :)
Posted: 10/13/2006 10:57 AM
Post subject: Learning Swedish
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Truncated
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Posts: 3109
Location: Sweden
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>I've looked into Rosetta Stone and Berlitz, but seeing as there's a good sized Norwegian user base here, I'm just curious if you guys have any suggestions or recommendations as to a good place to start? Methinks you meant nordic as opposed to Norwegian, no? If you know both English and German, you have a lot for free in Swedish. The grammar is very similar to English, the vocabulary has a lot in common with German (to a lesser portion, French and English vocabulary is present). Like I wrote elsewhere, native German speakers usually become fluent after about a year here. Native English speakers... usually don't, because they can get away with only talking English. Some resources: Online Swedish-English-Swedish dictionary: http://lexikon.nada.kth.se/swe-eng.shtml It doesn't contain a lot of advanced words, but all the basics are there, with explanations. It's aimed at immigrants in Sweden, but I use it all the time. Picture themes (Duden-lookalikes): http://www.skolutveckling.se/vaxthuset/bildteman/ http://www.skolutveckling.se/vaxthuset/lexinanim/ No translations, just pictures. I wish I had these for languages I'm learning. A brief online introduction course: http://www2.hhs.se/isa/swedish/ But, the best I can recommend for learning is really to sign up for a university course (probably there aren't a lot of them for Swedish or Finnish)... evening courses, teach-yourself CDs etc have been insufficient for all languages I've tried. I have a lot of experience learning foreign languages, and also some teaching Swedish to foreigners, so feel free to pester me via PM or IRC as often you like. :)
Posted: 10/13/2006 10:58 AM
(Edited: 10/13/2006 11:01 AM)
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Maximus
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
:P InterTran isn't all that great it would seem Truncated: Thanks. I'll definitely take you up on the offer.
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Posted: 10/13/2006 10:59 AM
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Maximus wrote:
:P InterTran isn't all that great it would seem
Systran/Intertran is horrible at Finnish. Every once in a while we see instruction booklets of technical gadgets that have been "translated" to Finnish apparently using Intertran, and those instruction booklets are completely illegible. I mean, completely. For example, it translates "page" (of a book) usually as a hotel boy, or "now" (as in this moment) as "there we are!", and it can't translate words like from/to/in at all (there are no exact translations for those in Finnish, because Finnish is fundamentally different).
Posted: 10/13/2006 11:07 AM
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Maximus
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Turns out the University of Toronto actually has a Department of Slavic Languages and Literature ... who'd a thunk it :P
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Posted: 10/13/2006 11:07 AM
(Edited: 10/13/2006 11:11 AM)
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Maximus wrote:
Turns out the University of Toronto actually has a Department of Slavic Languages and Literature ... who'd have thunk it :P
But neither Swedish or Finnish is a Slavic language.
Posted: 10/13/2006 11:10 AM
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Maximus
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Well that's a definite strike against taking those courses then
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Posted: 10/13/2006 12:19 PM
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Nibelung
Former player
Joined: 4/13/2006
Posts: 150
Location: Caratinga - MG - Brazil
Fabian wrote:
I thought there were way, way more Swedes and Finns than Norwegians here. Anyway, I have no idea where to start. Good luck though.
Put on this list Portuguese. Specially Brazilian. We have a lot of rules about grammar that even us don't understand.
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Posted: 10/13/2006 2:42 PM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Guybrush wrote:
If you want some challenge, Finnish and Japanese are the hardest languages to learn for non-natives.
A study has shown that, quite curiously, Finnish is one of the easiest languages for a child to learn as his native language, even though it is considered rather hard for an adult to learn as a foreign language. The same study showed that among the hardest languages for a child to learn as his native language are, not quite surprisingly, German and, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, English. One of the reasons why Finnish may be a bit hard to learn for an adult is that Finnish is a highly agglutinative language (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative), which is somewhat of a rarity in European and American languages, and thus people who are not accustomed to agglutinative languages can have a hard time learning that way of thinking. There's a superb example of the agglutinative nature of Finnish: The sentence "I wonder if I should run around (aimlessly)" can be all condensed into one word in Finnish: "Juoksentelisinkohan". Agglutination also means that words are very flexible. Nouns can be inflected in 14 ways and sometimes even more (English nouns are not inflected at all), and verbs have more than 130 inflected forms (compare that to the about 5 verb inflections in English; even Spanish, which has rich verb inflections, has only about 50 or so). This adds to the difficulty of learning the language.
Posted: 10/13/2006 2:44 PM
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nesrocks
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Location: Rio, Brazil
Hey! i understand all the rules in portuguese. Most of them. I think chinese is harder than japanese, but i've never studied chinese. Japanese is cool.
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Posted: 10/13/2006 3:39 PM
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Truncated
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Warp> English nouns are not inflected at all Well, almost... genetive can be seen as an inflection, and they do inflect by numerus (but I understand you were thinking about case). Pronouns, which are just standins for nouns, inflect by case. Nibelung> We have a lot of rules about grammar that even us don't understand. It is like this for every language. A native speaker can identify a correct sentence, but they don't know why it is correct, just that it is. Any way this whole "hardest language" thing that always comes up is not very interesting, because it always depends on your background and which languages you already speak. The hardest language to learn is always the one most remote from your own. Also, everyone seems to think that their own language is the hardest one to learn. :)
Posted: 10/13/2006 4:54 PM
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Gorash
Joined: 4/16/2005
Posts: 251
Truncated wrote:
The hardest language to learn is always the one most remote from your own. Also, everyone seems to think that their own language is the hardest one to learn. :)
Oh no. I'm german, and I found japanese a whole lot easier than french (which they forced us to learn in school). And japanese is also agglutinative. Not as extreme as finnish, but you can do some nasty stuff with adjectives there, like it was not warm -> atatakakunakatta, 暖かくなかった. As you know, since most people here seem to know at least basic japanese.
Posted: 10/13/2006 5:07 PM
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Blublu
Player (68)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
I know absolutely nothing about the Finnish language, but what I've heard leads me to believe it probably IS the hardest language you could learn. (well, maybe Ithkuil, its creator can't even speak it fluently and that probably says something) I don't know enough English to talk about Icelandic in English, so forget about it. All I know is that it is not as complex as Finnish (or so I have heard) and yet it is almost impossible to grasp the grammar, even native speakers often have trouble with it.
Posted: 10/13/2006 6:51 PM
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nesrocks
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Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Truncanted, in Brazil most people canNOT make correct sentences. 90% because they're uneducated, and 9.9% because they don't care.
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Posted: 10/13/2006 7:16 PM
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Heisanevilgenius
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Warp wrote:
The same study showed that among the hardest languages for a child to learn as his native language are, not quite surprisingly, German and, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, English.
Why is that so surprising? English has to be the most absurdly complicated language on Earth. Most native English speakers I've encountered on the Internet can't seem to grasp what, to me, are some of the most basic things. I'd consider my English skills excellent, yet even now and then I'll misspell something or forget how punctuation works in a very specific instance. For instance; I'm not entirely sure I placed that semicolon properly.
Posted: 10/13/2006 8:09 PM
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Boco
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Joined: 3/30/2004
Posts: 1354
Location: Heather's imagination
FODA wrote:
I think chinese is harder than japanese, but i've never studied chinese. Japanese is cool.
Chinese completely isn't harder at all. There's no morphology, each character is read only one way, etc.
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Posted: 10/13/2006 8:17 PM
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Heisanevilgenius
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Chinese is probably more complicated spoken than written. Cantonese is even more so.
Posted: 10/13/2006 9:33 PM
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Bob_A
Joined: 2/12/2006
Posts: 432
Warp: what study was that? I'd be very interested to look at it. Boco: that's true, but the syntax is very complicated. In my opinion, agglutinative languages are best because they can keep both morphology and syntax simple and still have a flexible word-order.
Posted: 10/13/2006 11:31 PM
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OmnipotentEntity
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Player (36)
Joined: 9/11/2004
Posts: 2630
Hyena wrote:
For instance; I'm not entirely sure I placed that semicolon properly.
You didn't. A semicolon requires an independant clause be on both sides of it; you can think of it as a subsitute period. You also may not use it along with coordinating conjunctions; however, using it with however is proper usage.
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