itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

Roofdieren = verscheurende dieren or is there a subtle difference?

Or does it mean carnivores?

Predators, carnivores, carnivorans... These are all different things in English, but who knows when to use which word? (I certainly don’t).

Same in Dutch, where there’s 4 or 5 of these: roofdieren, Carnivora, carnivoren (=vleeseters), predatoren. (“verscheurende dieren” is some kind of archaic term afaict). The first two are apparently synonyms, so that would make “roofdieren” “carnivorans” in English. However, in daily speech “roofdieren” is used as a catch-all term standing in for all of these categories.

(Now I’m starting to get a headache too!)

Thanks! Sorry to drag you down into my Dutch dictionary dilemma.

would you call it een waarachtige woordenboekworsteling?

Ik weet het waarachtig niet!

Chinese anyone?

Wil je nog koffie?

Mandarin course is pretty good but after battling through the third checkpoint I took a long break and haven’t really been back.

would you call it een waarachtige woordenboekworsteling?

Wil je nog koffie?

_would you call it een waarachtige woordenboekworsteling?_


Never heard of that. Sounds "stiff"

‘twas

Some discussion here of why Japanese is the hardest of the hard and more difficult to learn than Mandarin. https://www.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/7eqk7t/language_difficulty_ratings_according_to_fsi/#thing_t1_dq6u69a

Actual FSI site has only four categories and no asterisks. There German is not in its own category but lumped in with the slightly harder languages. Not sure who modified the categories and added asterisks but I agree with them.

Just learned about the so-called circumpositions in Dutch.

Een voorbeeld: ik loop langzaam naar hem toe.

So I usually watch netflix with the english subtitles on because we get a lot of street noise when the windows are open. Sometimes the shows or movies only have spanish subtitles. Last night I started watching a french movie with the spanish subtitles on and my brain couldn't deal. It was really bad.

I haven’t tried this yet but it seems like it could be useful.

https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com

Xpost this is what it feels like learning w duolingo. I mean, shit, my English is pretty good (eyeroll) but in my head I'm thinking about how sth gets lost when I have to translate to dutch. And I'm "content" is happy but in dutch we use the same word anyway. Gah

There can be something very confusing about hearing and reading subtitles in two closely related languages.

That extension does indeed look useful, Ed, thanks.

Ed, thanks! Yeah, I basically tuned out the french and was just reading the spanish and then getting confused about what language I was hearing. It also probably didn't help that I was drinking wine.

I used the non-extension search for Dutch and when I restricted availability to the US it gave me too small of a set, leaving out films that indeed I can see.

Thanks to subtitles I learned English as a kid. Here in Belgium we never dub films.

Been on duolingo for ab 40 days. Hurrah

Gefeliciteerd!

Maybe the point of that site is to only tell you videos with both audio and subtitles available in the target language.

I can't stress enough the importance of watching movies w subtitles. It really is a good way to learn a language. A dialogue goes much quicker and you have diff ways of speech/pronounciation.

Just remembered that when I was nipper I would read from a Dutch book in translation, Paulus and the Acornmen.

Oh man, Paulus de Boskabouter, that takes me waaaaay back in time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNaJ19bTqoE

We had this flexi disc at home when I was a kid (apparently it was a freebie that came with washing powder or something in... 1964) I must have listened to this a thousand times back then. All the characters were voiced by writer Jean Dulieu himself. “Even? Even? Dacht je dan dat dat zo gemakkelijk ging?”

And these were on TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9eTyUKDcPA

Wow, thanks!

Thank you for reminding me!

Tu n’as validé aucune unité
lors de ce test
Ne t’inquiète pas ! C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron.

Haha I can sort of understand this.

Have to say I'm less hesitant to address french customers. Yay

Surely a Flemish speaker the correct way to address French customers is with disdain.

I've got to the stage where my French vocab is pretty good but my grammar is sorely lacking. I'm working my way through this textbook although I wish it would stick in my head better.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51PYHL3xDbL._SX376_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Has anyone made any grammar breakthroughs recently?

A grammar breakthrough would be great - in my Spanish evening class we've learned three past tenses now (he hablado, hablé, hablaba) and have been collectively struggling for weeks to get to grips with the nuances of when each is to be used. Plenty of times it is obvious, but there are so many subtleties and I can't quite get the hang of it yet.

Surely a Flemish speaker the correct way to address French customers is with disdain.

Ah yeah breakthrough. I'm just studying what I learned in (and subsequently forgot after) high school. So no breakthrough.

I wonder if I finish duolingo, what I should do? Read Rimbaud? Or start memrise? Are there any apps that go further than duolingo? Je veux etre capable de seduire un Parisien. 😂

N’oublie pas Johnny Hallyday!

But I really came to post interesting expression I just came across that I don’t quite get:
een boterham met tevredenheid - du pain sec

Maybe something easier than Rimbaud, but I’m finding reading native material is really helping the Japanese. I joined a couple of reading groups on a Japanese learning forum. Find something that interests you and start to read. There are a bunch of browser extensions that allow you to look up words in browser which makes things faster although the built in Japanese-English dictionary on the kindle is terrible.

If I were doing French I’d be reading Asterix in French.

Oh good idea! Maybe they have Asterix on kindle

Et il y a aussi VanDamme.

Wat is een boterham met tevredenheid?!? Ik ga nu opzoeken.

Oh wow! Een boterham met tevredenheid is just a slice of bread. Nothing on it. So dry bread. Pain sec.

It seems to have a figurative meaning too, which I can’t quite parse:
Schaars inkomen, schaarse middelen waar men het maar mee moet doen

Oh I think I see

Daar gaan we weer!

Weer of geen weer.

Neem me niet kwalijk.

Oefening baart kunst.

I love the last saying. It's not used enough imo (in mijn opinie lol)