Category: Languages
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Is “Chinese” a complicated/difficult language? (And how does it compare to Russian?)
When someone mentions the language “Chinese”, nowadays they are usually referring to the current standard promoted by the Chinese government. That standard is currently Mandarin using simplified characters. However, there are other varieties of spoken Chinese such as Cantonese (considered to be a lingua franca), Taishanese (formerly considered to be a lingua franca; it was…
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Я изучаю русский язык (I’m learning Russian)!
I reached Level 10 Russian! https://www.duolingo.com I still have a long way to go though. Since Russian is significantly harder than Spanish, Italian, French, and Dutch (the language trees I’ve already completed on Duolingo), I’ve been doing quite a bit of the “strengthening” for it (at least three a day). While I was able to…
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Learn Taishanese (aka Hoisanva, Toisanwa) – 學台山話
我講台山話，未講普通話。我曉少少廣州話。I speak Taishanese, but I don’t speak Mandarin yet. I know a little bit of Cantonese. It’s taken some time, but I can finally type a bit of Chinese. 🙂 Some time ago I mentioned that I had found learning materials for Taishanese. I have finally finished volumes one and two of that material. 😀…
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Immersion, interactive, or rules-based learning? What’s best?
The following is copy of what I posted in DuoLingo’s discussion section. (See https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5380893) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Every few discussion threads, I keep seeing the topic of how best to learn a foreign language pop up. I think I should post some of my thoughts on this issue. I think it’s been proven so far that the…
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Language Learning – Working on More Languages
My recent study list has been mostly languages – Chinese (Hoisanva aka Taishanese), Korean, Spanish, Dutch, Irish, and Russian. I have yet to add German and Japanese to that. Technically, I’m bilingual as I’m able to speak and understand English and my dialect of Chinese (which is a weird mix of Taishanese and Cantonese due…
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Studying Korean 한국어을 공부해요 – Some Sources for Beginners
I’ve been studying Korean off and on (with some intervals of intense studying) for a while now, so I thought I should do a quick blog about some of the materials and sources I’ve used and/or am currently using. I started studying Korean using the Teach Yourself Korean book and audio files. The book starts easy,…
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Pimsleur Language Programs – Save Your Money
I finished with a couple of Korean language learning sources recently and am trying to decide on which one to use next. I decided to listen to a bit of the Pimsleur Korean. The audio track took at least six minutes to teach me one sentence in Korean. That’s right – at least six minutes.…
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Some Personal Thoughts on Human Rights and Space Travel
I’ve been reading astronomy all weekend. I’ve kind of missed it since I first took astronomy in university (and with all the changes in spaceflight going on – space tourism, woohoo! – I think I’d better brush up). Somehow I got an A in astronomy (no, not just staring at stars all year long) and…
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Learn Taishanese (台山話 aka Toisanwa aka Hoisanva)
For those who are interested in learning Taishanese (台山話 aka Toisanwa aka Hoisanva), I finally got a chance to put up a web page linking to the Taishanese learning material that I found (as mentioned in my previous blog post, ‘Learning Chinese: Cantonese or Mandarin? Or…? Taishanese!’). You may go to Learn Taishanese (台山話) (alternate link:…
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Learning Chinese: Cantonese or Mandarin? Or…? Taishanese!
A few years back, I tried looking for material on Toisan (aka Taishanese). The most I found was this linguistic paper, Toisan: A Cantonese Dialect by Aaron Lee, which I thought was fairly good in terms of giving you an understanding of the pronunciation in Toisan. What I didn’t know then was that the name…
Pneumatised! 