Here’s a recording of a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is?
This language is spoken mainly in India.
Here’s a recording of a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is?
This language is spoken mainly in India.
At the moment I’m reading Bill Handley’s Fast Easy Way to Learn a Language, which, as the title suggests, has lots of useful tips about learning languages.
One suggestion I particularly like is to compile a list of words and phrases you want to say and think will be useful to you, then to get translations of them in the language(s) you’re learning, and audio recordings as well, if possible. This will give you a personalised phrasebook that you can continue to expand and improve as you learn more of the language.
I suppose the phrases section on Omniglot could be thought of as my personalised phrasebooks for various languages. It’s something that started as a small collection of ‘useful’ phrases and has grown quite a bit since. I’ve just added a new page with Italian phrases, by the way.
Another good suggestion is that you use several textbooks: one textbook might not explain all the grammar or pronunciation very well, while another one might explain some of it more clearly. Each textbook will also contain different vocabulary and cultural information.
I came across an interesting article today, via this blog, about the connection between physical and mental fitness. According to a study undertaken by Charles Hillman at the University of Illinois, students who are physically fit and who take regular aerobic exercise, tend to do better academically then those who are unfit. Physical exercise increases the flow of blood to all parts of the body, including the brain, the blood brings oxygen and various proteins with it, which help brain cells to function more effectively.
Quite often I listen to my language lessons while juggling, skating, or doing some other form of exercise. I wonder if any studies have been done about the benefits of simultaneous physical and mental exercise.
If you want to learn a language that not many people study, it can be difficult to find language courses and other materials. Moreover, courses for regional languages and dialects are often only available in the dominant language of the country in which they are spoken. For example, resources for learning Italian dialects are mostly in Italian, and courses for the regional languages of France, such as Breton, Occitan and Alsatian, are mainly in French.
Recently I’ve had some questions about where to find materials for learning Luxembourgish, and also about Shanghainese, Hakka and a number of other languages of China. I found quite a good collection of links to Luxembourgish materials, and some reviews of Shanghainese courses on Sinosplice. Can anybody suggest other resources for learning these languages?
Are you studying any regional or lesser-studied languages? How do speakers of these languages react when you talk to them in their own language?
Last Saturday I went out with some Czech and Slovak friends, and was pleased to discover that I could get the gist of what they were talking about in Czech and Slovak. Although I could only catch the odd word and phrase, this was enough to get a basic idea of the subjects under discussion.
Before I started studying Czech, it just sounded like a continuous stream of meaningless sound. Now I can distinguish individual words in that stream and even know what some of them mean. My brain is gradually tuning into the language, a process that will take quite a while. I’m in no hurry though.
I started this blog exactly a year ago, so today is its first anniversary. It currently contains 319 posts and 3,213 comments, and is visited by around 300 people a day. Unfortunately it also attracts a huge amount of spam posts – over 30,000 to date – fortunately the spam filters catch most of these.
When I took my first tentative steps into the blogsphere, I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to find enough things to write about, but so far I’ve managed to write posts almost every day, and enjoy writing them as well. While perhaps not every post is a perfectly honed gem, I do try my best to make them interesting and informative.
I decided to give the blog a new theme today – hope you like it.
Today we have a recording of song in a mystery language. Can you work out which language it is?
Here’s a recording of conversation in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is?
Among the comments on an old post, a question about definite articles has been posed, and I thought it deserved it’s own post. Here’s the question:
Does anybody know if a system like the definite/indefinite article system exists in any other languages beside Indo-European and Semitic ones?
I can’t think of any non-Indo-European or non-Semitic languages with definite and/or indefinite articles. Can you?
People sometimes question the way the writing systems on Omniglot are classified. Most writing systems fit well into one category or another, but others straddle several categories, or don’t fit well into any category.
For example, when used to write Hebrew, the Hebrew script is an abjad or consonant alphabet. When it’s used to write Yiddish all the vowels are usually written, so is the Yiddish version a fully vocalised abjad or a phonemic alphabet?
Writing systems like Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Mayan are the most difficult to define. In many sources Chinese is classified as logographic, i.e. a writing system consisting of logographs or logograms, which are defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word”. This is not the best name for the script as only some Chinese characters are logograms. Other terms include morphosyllabic, logosyllabic, ideographic, pictographic.
In Visible Speech, John DeFrancis says that:
The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems.
Morphosyllabic seems to be a good term for Chinese, but what about Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Mayan, etc?
Any suggestions?