Do You Speak A Second Language?

Ha, echt? Leuk! How far did you come? Was it difficult for you?

So far just past the first checkpoint. How would you feel if I told I am enjoying it and not finding it especially difficult?

I'd feel great :) That's very good to hear. Are you planning on using it in any other context than racking up DL points? Do you have friends you could speak it with?

I wish

Well, did meet some Brazilians in the neighborhood recently, one of whom is half-Dutch and works for the Consulate, I think. Don't know if I will run into anytime soon, but always good to be prepared, I guess.

Actually already have a question for you. So "een tweeling" is a *pair* of twins? And also one single twin? And you can just tell by context which one you mean, with the first case being the default, or...

Also seems to me that "children" can be translated as "kinderen" but also "kids," but singular is only "kinder," no "kid" afaik.

Sorry singular just "kind" like, um, some other language.

"Een tweeling" is a pair of two people who are twins. It can never be one person of a two people who form twins. You do say 'mijn tweelingbroer' (my twin-brother), but you can't say "ik ben een tweeling" (I'm a tweeling), because that would literally mean you are two persons. Rather, you are part of a "tweeling". If that makes sense.

Children is 'kinderen', not 'kids' (though loads of Dutch ppl do say kids, taking it from English). Singular is 'kind'.

Perfect sense. Thanks!

Digging the Dutch word for clogs.

Other words besides "kids" that look like English: sorry, water.

Looks like we got the word "water" from you, and "sorry" came from us.

Alstublieft

Dankjewel

The two words of Dutch I remember from broadcasting hey Arnold and spongebob to the Netherlands and flanders 15 years ago. (I used to be able to sing the spongebob theme in Dutch)

wat heb jij lekker kontje!

(the expression I learned in Holland some years ago)

Flattery will get you nowhere Euler :)

nu in de bioscoop

My Dutch tree seems to have changed behind the scenes so I only have partial credit for various leaves and have to redo many lessons. Guess it is not a big deal except when I lose health have to switch to another tree to regain.

De schildpadden eten boterhammen

Finished Stressed Pronouns although I can't keep them straight yet

Ja! We hebben geen bananen.

lol: https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-racists-got-the-blues/

... and DL just added Korean.

A week and a half into Duolingo Spanish and i can say "la mayoria de la gente cree que estoy loco" and "estoy en el programa de proteccion a testigos" but couldn't honestly ask what time it is.

It's difficult because so much Spanish is mutually intelligible with English and French i can get most of the answers right without really learning anything. It seems to have a much weaker focus on genuine productive skills (like being able to translate sentences from scratch, rather than selecting word order) than some of the other courses.

haha! telling time/what time is it was a core feature of every Spanish class I took in grade school. ¿que hora es? son las dos y media. it always seemed like we learned the same things every year to the point where i wondered why we weren't allowed to learn more each year instead of learning the same thing. then we got a new teacher who introduced us to verbs and i started to understand.

so since my brother-in-law is German and my niece and nephew are growing up in Germany, I thought it might be time to learn some German. going to try it solely via Duolingo and see how far I can get. I have zero previous schooling or knowledge of German outside of watching Wim Wenders movies.

trying to avoid using any linguist shortcuts like looking up a phoneme inventory of German and just rolling with Duolingo. although I am doing Spanish too, just to make myself feel better.

Was ist der deal mit Flugzeugessen? That's a phrase that's gotten me by in Germany.

My big issue with Duolingo is that it often feels like I am beating the game rather than learning a language. Especially during he pick the boxes translation to English there is often only one way to arrange the boxes.

Nearly done with all the Japanese it has and i’ll be looking for what to follow in from it. I need something with a bit more (any) grammar explanation. Looking things up in a Japanese grammar dictionary whilst doing DL is not reallly cutting it n

Tend to agree with latest two criticisms. For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing. I haven't gone too far in the Japanese course but I can well believe Ed that you could fake it without quite making it and learning that mysterious thing know as Japanese grammar.

Otoh have found it very useful to practice agglutinative languages, which have rules that are logical but abstract and maybe hard to internalize.

for me the fun of doing Japanese in Duolingo is figuring out the grammatical patterns, like, how to negate, how to turn an assertion into a question, how to change a verb's tense. all of those elements have been there. supplementing that with an explicit explanation of the rules seems useful, but in becoming able to use the rules, I like Duolingo's approach.

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

There are tons of books on Japanese grammar, not sure which are the good ones, if any.

How for along are you in Japanese, Euler?

For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing.

Sort of agree with this, but on the upside, I feel like you can sort of conceptualize the language if you can connect it to English. With Swedish, there are a fair amount of words that are close to English words, and a few idiomatic phrases actually have equivalents in English. For example, the phrase for "agree" is "håll med," which literally translates to "hold with," and then I remembered reading the phrase "I don't hold with that" in 19th century English.

My practice regimen, outside of Duolingo, has been a) attempting to read crime novels in Swedish and b) trying to make up sentences in my head when I'm in the shower or riding on the train or whatever.

But did you study German before, Phil?

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, 2 October 2017 4:52 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It’s not the Japan Times Japanese grammar dictionary. I’m sure it’s a useful resource if you actually have some grounding but as a learning tool it’s obtuse.

But did you study German before, Phil?

No - I've only ever studied French (in school), Spanish and Japanese. None of the Japanese stuck - I can still maybe count to five, but that's about it.

So your Swedish studies are safe from Germanic interference then.

Yeah, but my wife - who studied German for several years - definitely noticed the similarities, and it has made things easier on her.

Well in that case...

I haven't been working on Japanese lately, since I returned from Japan. I'm still roughly where I was a couple of months ago. I'm going to Tokyo again in January so I'll pick up again in the next month or so.

I looked at the Japanese for dummies book but it's just romani apparently! That is not what I want.

romaji, duh.

I've got a couple Vlax Romani books you can borrow if you decide to take a radically different tack!

I've spent the last week on Italian in Duolingo and I think I want to commit to it as my third language. I only know the basics right now, but I'm trying to plunge in and puzzle through Italian news articles and opera libretti (also watching a Zelda Let's Play). There's enough lexical similarity with French that I can often pick up the gist of what's being said.

This is a fun reference page if you have one Romance language under your belt and are considering another one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

If you trust these numbers (data comes from Ethnologue/SLI International, who are problematic but probably OK with Romance languages info) JMM chose Italian wisely... it and French have the highest lexical similarity of all Romance language pairs! Well, tied with Spanish/Portuguese actually.