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Azmodes
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Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:44 am
Posts: 11196
Location: Ob der Enns, Austria
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 8:25 am 
 

German blows.
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Unity
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Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 5:42 pm
Posts: 1886
Location: Portugal
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 10:47 am 
 

Festivus wrote:
Unity wrote:

Yeah, and IMHO it's also the one that sounds the worst.

English or French? In my opinion French is far from being beautiful but not terribly ugly either. I found Spanish a lot uglier than French, per example. As for English, it depends on the accent. And since you're exposed to it since you're young it just ends up sounding "normal", I guess. Certainly doesn't sound exotic to me.

A language a lot of people seem to find ugly that I like a lot is German. I think it sounds pretty cool and I like its phonology as well. I like Dutch as well, since it's ugly in a good way. You know, the so bad it's good kind? :lol:


I meant French. And I also love the way German sounds.
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Unity
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Location: Portugal
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 10:49 am 
 

Azmodes wrote:
German blows.


How can you say that when you're austrian?
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Azmodes
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Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:44 am
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Location: Ob der Enns, Austria
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 10:52 am 
 

Pretty much answered your own question there. :P Nah, I don't really like the sound of Standard German, especially with a stereotypical Germany-German accent. Most folks around here speak Austro-Bavarian dialects, yours truly included, much easier on the ear. Some extreme cases as different from German as Dutch.
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Turner
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Joined: Fri Aug 23, 2002 2:04 am
Posts: 2247
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 2:49 pm 
 

a friend of mine lives just outside graz and i went to a family gathering of hers a year or two back - she had this one deadbeat uncle who'd come down from the hills, and i couldn't understand almost anything he said. the rest of the family made an effort to speak standard german so i'd be included etc, but he drew the line. didn't stop him from telling me his life story though, which made for an interesting afternoon. haha.

also i think french sounds WAY worse than german. much more guttural nonsense going on - german really doesn't do much of it, nowhere near as much as french (or dutch), but it somehow cops the brunt of the flack. i took french for a year at uni and my butchering of the sound system was shameful. plus it drove me nuts that so many words had like 3-4 letters on the end of the word that aren't pronounced, or suddenly are if there's a vowel up next, etc.

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Erotetic
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Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2010 8:05 pm
Posts: 1367
Location: New Zealand
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 2:53 pm 
 

have any of you guys tried this?
http://greatlanguagegame.com/

randomly chooses languages each time you play.


I find myself enjoying Finnish and Russian and Hebrew and German, particularly.
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Festivus
Metalhead

Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2014 4:26 pm
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Location: Portugal
PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 3:09 pm 
 

Yea I've come across that game before. I almost always get it right when it's a Romance/Germanic/Slavic language or Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese/Korean. Have trouble knowing when it's a central asian or south/south east asian language, though. Especially which one is it.

Honestly, I really enjoy listening to Slavic languages. Even though Polish has loads of consonants it's surprisingly smooth.

I wish some sound clips had better quality, btw.
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Azmodes
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Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:44 am
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Location: Ob der Enns, Austria
PostPosted: Sat Jul 19, 2014 9:51 am 
 

Turner wrote:
a friend of mine lives just outside graz and i went to a family gathering of hers a year or two back - she had this one deadbeat uncle who'd come down from the hills, and i couldn't understand almost anything he said. the rest of the family made an effort to speak standard german so i'd be included etc, but he drew the line. didn't stop him from telling me his life story though, which made for an interesting afternoon. haha.

Yeah, it's especially pronounced in the rural areas. You probably got to hear a lot of barked "ou"s and other diphthongs, that's very characteristic for this part of Styria.

Also agreed that French sounds fucking insufferable most of the time.
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oneyoudontknow
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Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 6:25 pm
Posts: 5343
Location: Germany
PostPosted: Sun Jul 20, 2014 4:44 pm 
 

Unity wrote:
And I also love the way German sounds.

Yeah, but kind of German are you talking about? The "hochdeutsch" or one of the dialects in Germany; spoken in Bavaria, Saxony and on the coast?
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Machine_Dead
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Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 3:47 pm
Posts: 947
Location: Belgium
PostPosted: Sun Jul 20, 2014 9:22 pm 
 

Festivus wrote:
severzhavnost wrote:
Festivus, I agree that German sounds nicer to me than most other people think it does. But you think Dutch is uglier than German? I'd say the opposite because vowels are soft and cute. Except in Gaelic. That's just an appalling jumble, no matter what letters are being abused.

Well, I find Dutch hilarious. Like I've said, it's not beautiful by any means but I still like it a lot. There's just something about it dunno.

The problem is that guttural "g".


even we Flemish people (Flemish as in 'someone living in the northern part of Belgium speaking their own variant of the Dutch language'... yeah i know confusing but that's they way it is ;p ) like to laugh with that. But then again, the Dutch probably would react the same when they hear a West-Flemish person pronounce any word with a 'g' (because they tend to transform any 'g' in a word into a 'h'). And I, as someone from Antwerp, would just probably use a totally different (uhm?) 'word' in my local dialect.

F.e.:

(English) Do you have/Have you.... ?
-> Dutch from Netherlands: 'Heb jij..' (pretty formal overall, I think)
-> Dutch in Antwerp dialect (Belgium): 'Edde gij...'
-> Dutch in West-Flemish dialect (Belgium): 'Ej hi..' or something like that

One and the same language (spread over 2 countries, hell maybe even 3-4 if you count Suriname and maybe the South African language as a weird distant cousin of the Dutch language), yet some many different dialects, ain't it just fun ?! :D

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Atrocious_Mutilation
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Location: Australia
PostPosted: Sun Jul 20, 2014 10:34 pm 
 

I've been trying to learn Thai since the beginning of the year. I have most of the script down and growing up there I picked up a lot of the necessary inflections, but learning the spelling of words is going to be a problem. There's a lot of assumed vowels that follow consonants and silent letters. But what makes it easier than European languages is that the grammar is very easy, as it's similar to English and the technical aspects of grammar like adverbs don't exist.

I'm nowhere near fluent, I have a while to go before I reach that level, but I hope to be fluent some day. The problem is vocabulary and the actual learning, since the more complex accents and inflections can only be taught by a native speaker. Even then, the native speakers have trouble translating the more obscure aspects into English. If anyone can help me with Thai that would be great, but I doubt there are any Thai speakers on MA.
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Unity
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Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 5:42 pm
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Location: Portugal
PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2014 12:32 pm 
 

oneyoudontknow wrote:
Unity wrote:
And I also love the way German sounds.

Yeah, but kind of German are you talking about? The "hochdeutsch" or one of the dialects in Germany; spoken in Bavaria, Saxony and on the coast?


I don't know, the one I was taught? *shrugs*
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Festivus
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Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2014 4:26 pm
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Location: Portugal
PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2014 2:47 pm 
 

Unity wrote:
I don't know, the one I was taught? *shrugs*

At school? You were taught standard german then. Hochdeutsch to be precise.
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Unity
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Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 5:42 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:05 pm 
 

Festivus wrote:
Unity wrote:
I don't know, the one I was taught? *shrugs*

At school? You were taught standard german then. Hochdeutsch to be precise.


Oh, I see. Thanks for the info!
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Festivus
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:18 pm 
 

Anyway, Hochdeutsch is fine, imo. Haven't heard much of the other dialects but I'm not very keen on swiss german. Austrian and bavarian accents can sound quite fun, though.

As for Dutch, don't think I've ever heard the Flemish variety in my life, even though I've been to Flanders before. Don't really remember it.

It's understandable for people to prefer their regional accent to others. I'm not fond of brazilian portuguese at all, per example. Especially their slang.
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Marag
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2014 4:19 pm 
 

Dutch is beautiful. It sounds like every stereotype of "barbarian grunting noises" turned into a real language. Written, it looks a bit like puke, but I like how it sounds.

oneyoudontknow wrote:
Yeah, but kind of German are you talking about? The "hochdeutsch" or one of the dialects in Germany; spoken in Bavaria, Saxony and on the coast?

Do Germans regularly talk in their native dialects, or everyone outside of tiny villages uses hochdeutsch?

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Festivus
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Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2014 4:26 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 21, 2014 4:23 pm 
 

Marag wrote:
Dutch is beautiful. It sounds like every stereotype of "barbarian grunting noises" turned into a real language. Written, it looks a bit like puke, but I like how it sounds.

oneyoudontknow wrote:
Yeah, but kind of German are you talking about? The "hochdeutsch" or one of the dialects in Germany; spoken in Bavaria, Saxony and on the coast?

Do Germans regularly talk in their native dialects, or everyone outside of tiny villages uses hochdeutsch?

Dutch to me is a drunken scottman's poor attempt at speaking german adding an english sounding word here and then. It's hilarious.
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Unity
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 22, 2014 11:48 am 
 

Festivus wrote:
Anyway, Hochdeutsch is fine, imo. Haven't heard much of the other dialects but I'm not very keen on swiss german. Austrian and bavarian accents can sound quite fun, though.

As for Dutch, don't think I've ever heard the Flemish variety in my life, even though I've been to Flanders before. Don't really remember it.

It's understandable for people to prefer their regional accent to others. I'm not fond of brazilian portuguese at all, per example. Especially their slang.


Ugh, neither am I! :p
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Rasc
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Joined: Thu Dec 16, 2010 9:19 am
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 27, 2014 8:26 pm 
 

You know what's really annoying? These Portuguese-speaking guys obsessed with taking Galician as a dialect.

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Festivus
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Location: Portugal
PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 12:03 pm 
 

Rasc wrote:
You know what's really annoying? These Portuguese-speaking guys obsessed with taking Galician as a dialect.

Huh? I don't know anyone who considers Galician to be a dialect of Portuguese. Only a small percentage Galicians do, afaik. And even then, they'd have to make some changes to it. And Most Galicians who don't want to be part of Spain would rather be an independent country than being part of Portugal. I don't know anyone here in Portugal who gives a damn about Galicia or hell, even Olivença/Olivenza.
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Azmodes
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Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:44 am
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 1:38 pm 
 

I understand it's considerably closer related to Portuguese than to Castellano, though, is it not?
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Ezeekial Zoratium
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Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:31 pm
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Location: United States
PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 1:41 pm 
 

I've always wanted to learn how to speak Arabic, but how the hell would I go about that and sound like a convincing Arab without shelling out thousands of dollars on learning software and tutors and unnecessary trips to the Middle East?
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Festivus
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 5:52 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
I understand it's considerably closer related to Portuguese than to Castellano, though, is it not?

It's in-between them, I'd say. But yea, it's closer to Portuguese than Castellano is. Dunno if it's closer to Portuguese or to Castellano, though. Phonetic wise, at least, it sounds like someone speaking Portuguese with a Spanish accent.
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Manic Maniac
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 6:41 pm 
 

Galician IS closer to Portuguese than to any othe language. Both languages are descendent of the "Galician-Portuguese" language that was spoken in Galicia back when most of Iberia was Mozarabic speaking. The reason Portuguese is different from Galician is because Portugal was for most of the Iberian history a seperate political entity while Galician has almost always been under Spanish rule.
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~Guest 226319
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 11:36 am 
 

Ezeekial Zoratium wrote:
I've always wanted to learn how to speak Arabic, but how the hell would I go about that and sound like a convincing Arab without shelling out thousands of dollars on learning software and tutors and unnecessary trips to the Middle East?

Head over to your local mosque or islamic center and tell them you have recently converted. Say you want to read the qur'an in its correct language and ask if they have any resources for learning arabic. They'll help you out. That will get you started learning. Language classes at your local college/university would run you hundreds, not thousands of dollars. Self-teaching books can help, especially with the alphabet and grammer. Flashcards can expand your vocabulary, and even cheap learning software will help you along, tho they won't grant you mastery. I suggest befriending arabic speakers and asking for assistance. A lot of arabic speakers come to the US to work and many would be willing to exchange arabic pointers for english pointers (tho if they are here they probably already know english and want to improve it). If you want to achieve native speaker mastery you'd have to immerse yourself in the language, which means going to the middle east. This is unnecessary, tho. As long as you can communicate intelligibly, no one is going to bust you for not sounding exactly like a native speaker. The ish is more about how dedicated you are to that goal.

If you aren't an Arab, you will never convincingly portray yourself as an Arab, so don't even try. If that's what you have in mind...

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Rasc
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Joined: Thu Dec 16, 2010 9:19 am
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 5:44 pm 
 

Well, yeah, it's not something people actually care about. I think it's more something of a small (but noisy) group of linguists and nationalists.

Medieval Galician and Medieval Portuguese were both varieties of Galician-Portuguese, a language that split up and went through major changes by the end of the Middle Ages. Nowadays they're very different, and Galician orthography, based in Castellano, makes it even farther.

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marktheviktor
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Location: United States of America
PostPosted: Sat Sep 06, 2014 12:22 am 
 

This week I purchased a Rosetta Stone pack to learn Swedish. Holy crap, that language is haaard! All those fucking vowels..killing me. Supposedly there are far less inflections in Swedish but that is only in comparison to German or Latin. There are obviously many cognates shared with Swedish and English but ironically it's some of those cognates that really tie my tongue up. Like the words for 'blue' and 'bread' for example. Otherwise, it's not so much the vocabulary as it is the pronunciation and syntax.

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TheGreatDuck
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 5:58 am 
 

LOL. Swedish has got to be one of the easiest languages ever.

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MutantClannfear
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 2:51 pm 
 

TheGreatDuck wrote:
LOL. Swedish has got to be one of the easiest languages ever.

Don't scoff, everybody's bound to be intimidated by the more complex aspects of their L2 when they first start off, especially if it's their first foreign language. Besides, generally speaking, you're only as good at learning a language as the resources you use, and quite frankly I doubt Rosetta Stone would be my first choice if I had to pick just one (hopefully marktheviktor isn't only using Rosetta Stone).
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Festivus
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 2:10 am 
 

TheGreatDuck wrote:
LOL. Swedish has got to be one of the easiest languages ever.

Well, clearly he doesn't agree with that. Finding something easy/hard doesn't necessarily make it so. I've always found English easy. It's always been my best subject at school and didn't even need to study for each test/exam, but I had several classmates who found it pretty hard. I suck at math and physics while others find both easy. Does't mean much.
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waiguoren
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 12:05 pm 
 

To be fair, grammar-wise Swedish is most certainly easier than, say, German. For a word like blå, the 'å' part sounds like 'aw' in paw to me, but vowel-wise my English is closer to Brit than American English, so maybe not the most helpful advice. Anyway, for that å sound maybe practice with the word på, which is a really common word in Swedish. For bröd, that umlaut o is pretty much the same as the German version, so if you can say danke schön then you can say bread as the consonants are the same as in English, maybe more trill on the 'r' but that's not too important I think as the r is pronounced differently depending on which part of Sweden the person comes from. I think in the beginning tough words in Swedish to pronounce are things like the shortened version of the number '27', it's one hell of a tricky way to say 'shu shu'.
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Festivus
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Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2014 4:26 pm
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 2:26 pm 
 

waiguoren wrote:
To be fair, grammar-wise Swedish is most certainly easier than, say, German. For a word like blå, the 'å' part sounds like 'aw' in paw to me, but vowel-wise my English is closer to Brit than American English, so maybe not the most helpful advice. Anyway, for that å sound maybe practice with the word på, which is a really common word in Swedish. For bröd, that umlaut o is pretty much the same as the German version, so if you can say danke schön then you can say bread as the consonants are the same as in English, maybe more trill on the 'r' but that's not too important I think as the r is pronounced differently depending on which part of Sweden the person comes from. I think in the beginning tough words in Swedish to pronounce are things like the shortened version of the number '27', it's one hell of a tricky way to say 'shu shu'.

Sure but maybe the poster who's trying to learn Swedish has never learned German or a harder language before. If I tried to learn Arabic, Mandarin and Finnish; I'd probably start finding French and German very easy languages... in comparison, at least.

I find it odd that he's struggling with the basics, though. Languages only start getting complicated when you move past the basics. Is he having trouble with sentences such as "good morning" and "my name is..."?

I might learn a North Germanic language some day. Will probably go for Norwegian. The Bokmal variety, that is.
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~Guest 21181
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 2:36 pm 
 

Well, he already said it's primarily the pronunciation and syntax, not grammar. I'm somewhat puzzled about the syntax (I think it is pretty similar to English?), but pronunciation I can understand having a hard time with, especially if it's his first L2.

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Festivus
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 2:56 pm 
 

Earthcubed wrote:
Well, he already said it's primarily the pronunciation and syntax, not grammar. I'm somewhat puzzled about the syntax (I think it is pretty similar to English?), but pronunciation I can understand having a hard time with, especially if it's his first L2.

What is L2? I don't know how Rosetta Stone works.
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Azmodes
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 3:12 pm 
 

Second language.
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Festivus
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 3:24 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
Second language.

Ah, I see.

Well, if Swedish is the first foreign language then I can see why he's having so much trouble at the beginning. Plus, I suppose that an adult has more trouble learning his first foreign language than a kid does. I started having English classes in 1st grade.
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Festivus
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 5:08 pm 
 

Well I know this thread is over 2 years old now but I wasn't going to create a new one where there's this one already, so I'm sure it's OK if I bump this one, right?

Oh well, I still "study" German on my free time. Sometimes it makes me feel good and other times it makes me frustrated. I do Ok at reading it nowadays for the most part.

For some odd reason I've been entertaining the idea of learning Russian lately, but I dunno if I'm ever gonna pull the trigger or not. The part that "scares" me the most is Cyrillic... although I've been told that's actually one of the easiest things about learning Russian. I guess I'd just like to know a Slavic languages considering I already speak a Romance language fluently(Portuguese) and a Germanic one(English and hopefully someday German).

How about you guys? Made any progress in whichever languages you were trying to learn or have picked up since then?
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Sepulchrave
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 5:35 pm 
 

Festivus wrote:
For some odd reason I've been entertaining the idea of learning Russian lately, but I dunno if I'm ever gonna pull the trigger or not. The part that "scares" me the most is Cyrillic... although I've been told that's actually one of the easiest things about learning Russian. I guess I'd just like to know a Slavic languages considering I already speak a Romance language fluently(Portuguese) and a Germanic one(English and hopefully someday German).


Yeah with Cyrillic you're basically just transposing most of the vowels and consonants found in your native language to slightly different looking symbols + a few other goofy sounding vowels/consonants/palatisations/etc, depending on what Slavic language you're learning. With minimum practice you get used to it quite quickly. Really, really not the most difficult part of Slavic languages. Just wait until you're doing declensions or sentence structures, oh lawd save your soul. :D

My language learning situation is weird. I've been learning German since I was 8 but my lack of willpower has made me utterly incompetent in doing grammar. Duolingo has helped on occasion, but the problem is that I've been using the program only in bursts and usually end up completely forgetting anything new that I've learned afterwards. Ho hum.
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Festivus
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:47 pm 
 

Well German has cases/declensions too and also a tough word order in comparison to other langues out there, so I hope that has served as some practice.

Any good movies in Russian language out there? I've seen Dersu Uzala(Kurosawa remake) and it's pretty good.
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Sepulchrave
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 9:01 am 
 

Festivus wrote:
Well German has cases/declensions too and also a tough word order in comparison to other langues out there, so I hope that has served as some practice.


It helps a bit, I think, but Slavic declensions and sentence structuring are generally still tougher than German. Also, in my experience, as a native speaker of a Slavic language, knowing noun genders in my own one has helped me quite a lot when studying German noun genders, so I guess you could say the same vice versa.

Quote:
Any good movies in Russian language out there? I've seen Dersu Uzala(Kurosawa remake) and it's pretty good.


Kin-dza-dza, Solaris, Stalker, Nostalghia, Battleship Potemkin, Man with a Movie Camera, Hedghehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales (both animated movies by Yuri Norstein), Come and See and Don Quixote (1957), off the top of my head. All amazing classics of Russian cinema.
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wizard_of_bore wrote:
I drank a lot of cheap beer and ate three Nacho BellGrandes. A short time later I took a massive messy shit and I swear it sounded just like the drums on Dirty Window from Metallica's St Anger album.

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