Topic: Learning a new language - page 25. (Read 14192 times)

Learning new language is not easy you need a lot of time, focus, resesrch, understanding and also you need this patience. You can try dictionary like the grammar. What kind of language you want to learn? English or others?

Google Translate is only useful if you want to access content but it usually translates poorly. It's fine if you want to learn a few sentences to enable to communicate at a basic level, say if you're going abroad and want to write down a few basic questions that you think could come in handy. However it is not a way to learn a language. Just because you eventually stopped using it while chatting to Skype users, doesn't mean that what you were writing was correct or even made sense. They probably figured out what you wanted to say but didn't correct you.

The thing with languages is that it's easier to make some effort and learn the basics first and get them right because if you just go along and try to guess you will only hurdle with you a lot of mistakes that will be much harder to correct further down the road.

That actually isn't true. It depends on personal skills of course but it is possible to learn to speak a language without (or with very little) accent and even lose the intonation of your native language. Very hard, but possible, especially for those who have a good musical ear and can get to reproduce sounds very accurately.

That's a very original choice! The pronunciation is hell but everything else is a breeze. Danes come across as very open and friendly, however  it really isn't that easy to make friends with them but if you are in the capital there is a great expat community and life standards are pretty high. So, all I can say to you is...tillykke! 

Well, it depends on the language you want to learn and also why you want to learn it (fun, work, relocating...) but as a general rule I would suggest to:

1) buy a basic grammar book and a bilingual dictionary
2) try to find audio/videos on line to acquaint yourself with the pronunciation (if you don't have a teacher or a native speaker to help you)
3) once you have the basics such as alphabet, pronunciation and its exceptions, the basic verbs such as "to be" and "to have", try to learn a few words and their articles and plurals.
4) expand your vocabulary by incorporating more words and verbs to start forming simple sentences.
5) repeat 4) ad infinitum!

Good luck and have fun!

There are two ways to learn many foreign languages: sequentially (one language to another) or simultaneously at a time. Learning many foreign languages ​​at a time will certainly save you time, because basically, you do multitasking.Instead of mastering one language in 1.5 years, you can master two languages ​​in two years.
No need to bother to the destination country to learn the language. Today, the Internet is filled with language learning tools, such as apps, translators, online flashcards, and ebooks. Many of these facilities you can get for free.Now, just leave it all back to you to harvest all these conveniences. You live in an age where education and information are at your fingertips.

Yup... that kind of comes through from what you've just written...

Finnish people should just stick to learning Swedish 

You will find that learning a bit of grammar helps too. Trust me.

Google Translator is an endless source of fun for real linguists! The translations are all over the place and it's great entertainment! Nowhere near as bad though as Facebook translations these days...ha ha! 

I am now in the process of learning Mandarin because I believe that China became the center of the world economy beat the US,
In Chinese is very difficult in pronunciation because of its difficult logat for me. For that I studied directly with a native tutor from China

Finnish is NOT a Scandinavian language! Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are!

Hey SlaughterGirl,

I hate to break it to you but Finnish is NOT a Scandinavian language. It is part of the Ugro-finnic group of languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish...) as you rightly point out in your last sentence, whereas Scandinavian languages are Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic.
The fact that Finland borders with Russia has no influence whatsoever on the fact that Finnish is spoken as it is written. Russian is a Slavic language  written in Cyrillic, as your own language, and it is not entirely spoken as it is written as there are many subtleties and exceptions.

I don't know where you decided that Finnish must be easier than any Scandinavian language since it is actually the other way around but since you are Serbian and surely understand Russian here's a comparison:

- Russian has 6 cases. Finnish has 16. That alone should make anyone run for their life!!!!!

- Finnish is exclusively spoken in Finland, a population of roughly 5 million people who are all but talkative (and often "netrezovy"...) and therefore holding a conversation can prove extremely challenging to say the least...

- the most frequently used letter in Finnish is "K" which, together with all those double vowels, give it its typical hard sound.

- unlike what you stated in your post, knowing one Scandinavian language actually unlocks all the others as Norwegians, Danes and Swedes easily communicate with each other by each speaking their own language. They kind of tone down the pronunciation by gearing it a bit more towards Swedish (mostly Danes do that as Norwegian may be more similar to Danish in writing but when spoken it is extremely close to Swedish). When they do this they usually refer to it as "speaking Scandinavian"

- unlike what you stated in your post, there is not a "large difference between them" at all. I've learnt one, didn't take too long, and I easily read financial papers in all the 3 languages. Three birds with one stone!

- Finland has two official national languages: Finnish and Swedish, which most people speak or learn in school. That's the reason why in Finland all street signs are written in both languages so if you had chosen Swedish instead, you would have had direct access to Finland too! Four birds with a single stone!!!

I don't know at which stage you are at this point or why you decided to learn Finnish (for fun, work or to move there eventually) but if you're looking at getting some gain out of a language, you might want to check Swedish. I don't know if I'm allowed to post links so I won't but you can stream some programs from the Swedish national channel SVT  or the Finnish YLE  (careful! most programs here are subtitled in Finnish but sometimes the program itself in in Swedish...). You can take some time to get acquainted with their different sounds and then make up your mind. As someone experienced with languages however, I would always suggest doing research PRIOR to starting learning a language!  

I really want to learn Mandarin, the method that I applied so far is limited in conversation only in Mandarin, because I learned from the Chinese descendants, who are in my country.

Don't rely too much on the grammar.
Keep a contact with a native speaker of the language which you are interested in learning.
Practice a lot!!!!!

If you want to refresh it you can start by streaming their online tv channels. Kanal Kultura is very good and they have a lot of documentaries that are really well made on writers, actors and so on. The language is of course of a higher standard than you would find in talk shows. You can stream it as a background to whatever you are doing and it can be really helpful in taking back to surface everything you have learnt, however long ago that might have been.

Well, "speak" probably isn't the most appropriate verb to use. Hard to imagine anyone chit chat in HTML down at the local pub...!   

You really don't need to marry. You can start with just having an affair!  (unless the othe rperson is ridiculously rich in which case I totally recommend marriage)

Just spend some time in the country where that language is spoken, meet people, hang out with them, have a romp if you really have to, try force yourself to communicate in that language and not ask people to switch to English. That's enough, really. 

If you really speak these languages very well as you say then you can definitely take on a new one and learn that too well enough. It gets more difficult after 30 but your brain is already well trained so you should be fine till 40, easily!

It is true indeed! It depends on many factors, one of them being the fact that you learn a different language at a different stage of your life, when you literally are a different person from the one you were when you learnt your native language. Given that in order to learn a language well you usually have to spend a period of time abroad, in a complete different setting than the one you're used to, that takes out parts of yourself you probably didn't even know existed. Every time you are immersed in a different reality, a different part of you comes out. It's a coping mechanism of finding yourself in unknown environments, especially when the language you're trying to learn is the only one in which it is possible to communicate. Plus, you take in new things and you evolve. Once you learn the language, or are able to express yourself freely in it, you will relate to that language also based on your experience of that culture, within that culture. You change a bit the moment you change language depending on what that language means to you and all the associations you have with it. Personally, I think that a great deal of how a language affects a person is primarily in its sound and structure. Russians are known to have a complex mind and a complex soul and the explanation is all there in their complex, beautiful language.

The most amazing thing is when you start thinking in that language. There comes a day at some point (usually when living abroad) when you wake up and realize you just dreamt in that new language! You can literally dream of your mom arguing with you in a language she doesn't know, and yet in your dream she does. That's the moment you realize that you have started thinking in that new language and your mind is just at ease using it as it is using your native language. A happy day indeed that is!