Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Foreign Language
- Thread starter hawkeye_a
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
1. G'day. "Not bad"/"Not much"? "No i don't speak Italian"?
2. G'day. Fine thanks. Because it sounds beautiful, and i'd like to be able to watch(and understand) Italian movies without subtitles for a change, and to eventually be able to converse in Italian.
You see? This is a start! It's not that difficult. Italian doesn't really have many "exceptions", especially on pronunciation. Feel free to PM me if you want to text in Italian.
Ottimo lavoro!
No problem ... I've got this ....
Hello,why did you come here ? The Italian speaks of impairing the perch.
It's a whole lot easier to pick up languages when you're a kid . Spoke Czech (picked up from the old folks ) passable German (from hanging out with a couple of kids from Germany) and suffered through 2 years of Spanish in High School ( which only counted as one) . The first two have been lost long ago , and what's left of my pitiful Spanish is Spanglish , which is occasionally helpful where I live , and has provided me with the ability to embarass my traveling companions , and entertain the locals in at least 6 Central/South American countries .
Embarassment and humor in one! It's almost like starting a thread in this very forum!!
All I remember of High School French is, Oui, Non, Je ne sais pas, je m'apel, merci, and Ou sonte le sal de ban (spelling).
(In other words: Yes, no, I don't know, my name is, thanks and where is the bathroom?)
I can say thanks in 7 languages and constantly butcher what little Italian, Mandarin, and Russian I've picked up from movies.
EDIT: I would like to learn 1-3 of the above languages and a Scandinavian one. I've tried using apps and was starting to learn to read Cyrillic, but like most things lately, no go.
(In other words: Yes, no, I don't know, my name is, thanks and where is the bathroom?)
I can say thanks in 7 languages and constantly butcher what little Italian, Mandarin, and Russian I've picked up from movies.
EDIT: I would like to learn 1-3 of the above languages and a Scandinavian one. I've tried using apps and was starting to learn to read Cyrillic, but like most things lately, no go.
Last edited:
Yes I do get confused between Hindi, Hindu, Indian, and not to mention similar sounding Urdu
If you come from a monotone language like English or Japanese, pronunciation in a tonal language will prove very challenging. Not impossible, but very challenging. It's easy for someone who speaks Cantonese to learn to speak Vietnamese or Thai because both are tonal languages. I know a guy white guy who is fluent in Vietnamese, but it takes a bit of processing to understand what word he's trying to say.
Singing helps a lot in learning tonal languages. My wife taught me how to speak Vietnamese. Whoa boy, I spoke monotone the first year and no one could understand a word I said.After 15 years, she tells me I almost speaks as well as our kids.
Yarp. My daughter does this. Her favorite phrases are "Nani" (What?!) and "Oyaji no baka" (Stupid old man...that's me
I can be wrong but I thought Chinese is the only tonal language, I never understood how it works. I can't imagine how someone tone makes the word change meaning. How does it work if you are screaming or crying, the tone will change obviously.
You have just hit on the difference between being able to speak another language and being fluent. Fluency requires cultural implications that native speakers unwittingly throw into language and bring nuance to our speech.
Having taught French for the first 25 years, I don't recommend trying to learn a language on your own unless you're planning on spending hours on YouTube with authentic video (not "how to speak" videos).
I will also suggest that learning Hebrew is not as difficult as one might think. The written alphabet can be learned rapidly. Pronunciation is simple, and the best part is there are only three tenses.
Of course, the very best way of learning a language - once you have acquired some sort of basic proficiency - is to go to the country where it is spoken for a number of months, and immerse yourself in the language and culture by putting yourself into a situation where you will have no choice but to read, and listen, and watch TV and interact with the locals in their own language.
I'm a polyglot and a self-learner. But this is different to your situation since I've only learned languages that share a common alphabet with my native language.
I would guess that languages with different sets of idioms (japanese, hebrew, hindi, russian, greek, etc.) are the worst to self-learn. Or at least really, really difficult.
I only speak english, catalan and french (besides my native spanish). But then again, after the initial phase of learning on my own I moved to places where I only spoke those languages: after living all my life on the US-MX border (where I learned english) I moved to Amsterdam. And after meting a girl from Sabadell (and learning catalan) I moved to Barcelona. While living in Catalonia, I learned french and visited southern France on weekends.
Last edited:
Yeah, I tend to overeat sometimes too.
There are lots of tonal languages. Swedish and Norwegian, for example. The Swedish word anden means either the duck or the spirit depending on the tone used. Other languages have different phonological quirks. Danish has no tones but instead employs a glottal stop to distinguish between homonyms, so that in speaking the glottal stop at the end of hund (dog), which replaces the silent d is the only way to differentiate it from hun (she).
If you think tones are strange, you need to look at Xhosa, which employs clicks as phonemes.
To be fair, the Danes can't understand each other once they move enough in their country. It's a dialect issue. It's more common in Belgium with individual villages having their own dialect and accent.
[automerge]1569971969[/automerge]
[automerge]1569971969[/automerge]
Isn't Cantonese worse in this aspect?
I‘m not the one who should give Mandarin lessons because if I ask for bing in a restaurant I might get bread or some ice. 😔 But the basic tones are /, \, —, and U.
We use tone in English to discern between humor and seriousness. I don't see why it would be difficult to understand some languages use tone to mean a variety of words.
In other words, I could ask you a question in a very sarcastic tone. A question I already know the answer to but enjoy putting you on the spot. Or I could ask in earnest in the method of enunciating the sentence's words because I'm genuinely curious for the answer.
In other words, I could ask you a question in a very sarcastic tone. A question I already know the answer to but enjoy putting you on the spot. Or I could ask in earnest in the method of enunciating the sentence's words because I'm genuinely curious for the answer.
Back before touch-tone, it was common to use clicks to phone me.
no how would you be sarcastic in Mandarin when the word meaning itself changes with the tone
That's a very different type of tone.With tonal languages, it's more like music.Sarcasm is inflection. If the word must be pronounced as a "shout" to have a certain meaning, you can't change it to indicate humor because that would then change the meaning of the word itself.
When I first started learning Mandarin (predating pinyin, so while I could speak it, I never learned to read or write it), the example that was always used was the word "hau," which means "good." That is, providing you use a falling tone. If you use the rounded tone it means "horse." So while you could try using inflection to indicate emotion, it does not work well in a tonal language.
The Foreign Service Institute (language training for diplomats) has a chart which indicates how long it would take an English speaker to lean a language
All of these sites that say "15 minutes a day" might allow you to do basic tourist navigation, but aren't going to prepare you for living there.
There are a ton of learning programs. Rosette Stone is probably the most famous. Presents things in very small steps (images, sound) and then combines simple things to make more complex ones. Has speaking recognition to analyse your pronunciation.
Before a trip to a new language area I would get the appropriate transparent language program. Presents text, pronunciation and translation simultaneously so you can very quickly pick stuff up. Unfortunately all of these have now gone from a 1 time expense to a subscription basis.
Neither is cheap. You have to decide on your ultimate goal, and pick a program accordingly.
| Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) | |
|---|---|
| Afrikaans Danish Dutch French Italian | Norwegian Portuguese Romanian Spanish Swedish |
| Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours) | |
| German | |
| Category III: 36 weeks (900 hours) | |
| Indonesian Malaysian | Swahili |
| Category IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours) | |
| Albanian Amharic Armenian Azerbaijani Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Croatian Czech *Estonian *Finnish *Georgian Greek Hebrew Hindi *Hungarian Icelandic Khmer Lao Latvian | Lithuanian Macedonian *Mongolian Nepali Pashto Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik) Polish Russian Serbian Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Tagalog *Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek *Vietnamese Xhosa Zulu |
| Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours) | |
| Arabic Cantonese (Chinese) Mandarin (Chinese) | *Japanese Korean |
All of these sites that say "15 minutes a day" might allow you to do basic tourist navigation, but aren't going to prepare you for living there.
There are a ton of learning programs. Rosette Stone is probably the most famous. Presents things in very small steps (images, sound) and then combines simple things to make more complex ones. Has speaking recognition to analyse your pronunciation.
Before a trip to a new language area I would get the appropriate transparent language program. Presents text, pronunciation and translation simultaneously so you can very quickly pick stuff up. Unfortunately all of these have now gone from a 1 time expense to a subscription basis.
Neither is cheap. You have to decide on your ultimate goal, and pick a program accordingly.