Supposedly, if you memorize 100 basic words, you’ll be able to understand approximately 50% of whatever language those words are in. It seems like a good idea, but I have difficulty memorizing even those 100 words. I guess I need to work harder at it. I’ll get them memorized one of these days!
…in another language is difficult, obviously. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t go back to trying to learn Esperanto again, instead of Japanese. Or maybe I should get back to practicing my Spanish. Or French. Or maybe I should try Italian or even German for a change.
I know I should try to stick to one language, but they’re all just so interesting! It’s not fair! *sigh*
I still wish there was some way to just instantly learn a language. At first, you’d speak like machine translation. But, since you’re smarter than a machine (hopefully), you would slowly learn the proper idioms and such. It would be faster than ‘normal’ language learning, since you’d get the vocabular loaded in. That’s the part I have problems with, learning the vocabulary and making it stick. Bah!
So, apparently, I am ‘studying’ Japanese again. How did this happen? I think it was one of the FF things I installed. It’s a Firefox add-on called PeraPera-kun and it is nifty! It has a Japanese dictionary and all you have to do is hover your mouse over the kanji/kana/hiragana (I still cannot remember which is what) and it pulls up definitions for you. Of whole words! Things I have seen before took each character separately, but this one will take the word as a whole.
It is so handy. Now I just need to remember how to pronounce all the bazillion (okay, not really) hiragana so I know how to pronounce Japanese properly.
I’m sure you already know this, if you’ve ever tried Google translation or Babelfish. But, today, I installed the ‘FoxLingo’ FireFox add-on. It can (by using various translation sites) translate webpages to and from a variety of languages.
So, I decided to try out various translators on my blog.
Translating ‘And don’t come back! I am still sick.’ from English to Italian, I got:
I asked an Italian speaking friend for help and found that they mean:
Two translation services choked on the irregular apostrophe in “don’t”. Apparently, ‘dont’ (no apostrophe) is considered to be an obscure term for a university teacher or professor by Freetranslation. I’ve never heard of such a term. And Answers.com doesn’t have it listed, either.
So the first ones (Wordlingo and Bestiland) apparently did the best job overall, since they can’t know if I am a male or female. Definitely interesting, since I would have thought that those sentences were simple and easy to translate. I’m told that Worldlingo does a fairly good job, for a machine, of translating the rest of my blog.
Here are a few sites you may find interesting:
Linguistics & Languages – a blog all about languages. They also have links to several linguistic sites of interest, including Omniglot.
Not strictly a language site, but there is Jamendo. This is a music site and, while I haven’t downloaded any yet, there is music in languages other than English, like that of Eva Garcia.
LibriVox – Download audio books in various languages (including English), for free.
ggg is for ggginger – No, I don’t really understand the title either. Anyway, this site has a rather long poem with a list of English words that should rhyme but don’t or do rhyme but shouldn’t, according to spelling. Definitely a tongue twister, if you attempt to read it aloud.
It used to be the ‘thing’ for average people to spend a few weeks in Europe. These days, I don’t think most people travel abroad, for one reason or another. Personally, however, I would love to be able to go to Europe. Anywhere, almost, for at least a few days.
But once I got there, where would I go? Luckily, it is possible to download an audioguide to listen to on your MP3 player of cities in Europe. Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona. And in multiple languages, too!
I’m considering downloading the ones in French and Spanish, even if I can’t actually visit the cities, so that I’ll have some extra language stuff to listen to.
I went to sleep today with Spanish language learning audio files. I’ve listened to them before, but it has been awhile. It’s kind of funny, I can mostly understand the Spanish while it’s playing but I have a hard time remembering it later.
That always happens. I can remember the other language’s words just fine while I’m studying… but step away from the books and I can barely remember a single word. It is very frustrating!
But one of these days… one of these days… I will become fluent in something!
I’d like to be fluent in at least one other language, semi-fluent in others.
