Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Don't worry, I knew that from the stories my high school Spanish teacher would tell from when she went to Spain. I'm not CRAZY.

Incidentally, I think this is apropos for this thread.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

Yeah, I think you need the ablative there. "In Latina Dua" maybe?

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Dans Canada, tout les personnes doivent apprendre le francais dans l'ecole.
Yes, I realize that this sentence is missing the appropriate accents entirely.
No, I don't care.

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You are correct, and I swear that I know at least that much Latin in most cases.

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I lol'd.

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So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?

I'm not presently learning any foreign language (coding aside), but I would just like to chime in saying that the collective modmin staff is able to speak fluent clannish. In fact, it is the native tongue of half our discussions.

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Meanwhile as The Faceless Evil closes in on the hapless, sleeping, populace...
Across town in a shanty one-bedroom, an old woman feeds her parakeet.

I wouldn't advise trying to take them on all at once, especially if you think you're doing horrible at them. At the very least, you need to prioritize. Make the language you're most interested in your primary interest.

The thing with languages is they're so massive. You don't realize how ridiculously huge language is until you learn a good deal of another one. I still don't even have complete mastery of basic Spanish vocabulary, although I do have some intermediate and advanced vocabulary as well. (It's one of the quirks of studying alone. Currently I'm trying to patch up the more glaring holes in my basic vocabulary... I think it was two days ago I learned the word for "closet"!)

- Kef

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Make me. ...

I'm not in "serious study-mode" for any of them, so it really doesn't matter whether I'm horrible or not. They're just languages that I'm learning.


Yes I do. I'm a writer.

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Meanwhile as The Faceless Evil closes in on the hapless, sleeping, populace...
Across town in a shanty one-bedroom, an old woman feeds her parakeet.

I'm a writer too -- not by profession or anything, but my active vocabulary is above average and all that -- and I still didn't fully grasp how huge language is until fairly recently.

- Kef

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Meanwhile as The Faceless Evil closes in on the hapless, sleeping, populace...
Across town in a shanty one-bedroom, an old woman feeds her parakeet.

Yeah, I love English, though I tend to abuse it at times. I think I'm becoming better at it, though... a year or so ago I had this nasty habit of overusing parentheses and semicolons in less serious writing (LJ/forum posts, etc.), and I think my style has finally toned back down to something more normal.

I don't know terribly much about Spanish slang yet, though I know a few things. The most obvious example to me is "¿Qué onda?", which is used in Mexico as a rough equivalent of "What's up?", and it literally means something like "What wave?" (i.e., "What's the wave?").

Ordinary words and phrases can be illuminating, too. For instance, the Spanish word for anteater is "oso hormiguero" -- literally "anthill bear".

- Kef

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Right now, I'm still studying russian and italian full time. I study german and french whenever I get the chance. I dont study spanish all that much, although my definition of "very much" is probably different than the average person's.

Anyway, I was wondering if anybody here had played the my spanish coach and my french coach games for DS. I have both, but I just feel that they are too formulaic and dont have a good teaching method. Furthermore, I've learned very little grammar. I just wanted to know if anybody has gotten far into the game, because I wanted to know if it gets better. I still maintain that they are decent vocabulary builders, but I doubt that they could "Make you fluent" as was the claim.

I might be heading back down to little odessa soon for another russian trip, and over the summer, I might actually go to russia. I wanted to go this week, for the new president's inaugural ceremony, but I have too much to do.

I still have done course selections for next year. I know I'll be taking italian, since I know italian more than any of my other foreign languages that they teach at the college I'll be going to (community college for 2 yrs). Then I'll transfer out to a college that teaches russian. All the while, I'll still be learning russian on my own.

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Voglio imparare l'italiano

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Spanish helps in that venture. They're like cousins.

But the kind that dont like each other.

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I know. One reason I don't really think I should learn Italian yet is that I might get my Spanish and Italian confused. I'm juuuust starting to get a firm footing in Spanish, and I don't think I should start Italian until that process is complete. And there are other reasons that I stated on the preceding page that I don't really want to start on it yet.

- Kef

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I remember going to an Italian opera when I was high school. I think it was Tosca. Anyways, I remember they put the words (in Italian) on this screen over the stage. I was able to figure out parts of it because spanish and italian are so similar.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

Yeah, I can often work out bits of Italian, Portuguese, and sometimes French. Certainly not enough to form anything really coherent, though.

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This thread seems to keep dying. Am I really the only guy here who is passionate about languages?

Anyway, the other day I discovered lang-8.com, a site where you can post in your journal in any language and people can come along and post corrections. So if I make a post to my journal in Spanish, each sentence has a link you can click where you can revise what I said, complete with easy formatting to make your changes obvious. If you're learning a language, you should definitely check it out.

EDIT: Almost forgot! Here's my journal page there.

- Kef

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Well, i'm learning german. and maybe japanese afterward.

Est ist nicht mein Geburtstag, fraulein!

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I'm learning German [so taking German classes instead of Spanish in high school] through my music, and then maybe should take Spanish this coming year. Nohurtmekef, but I hate Spanish.

@Poopskin, it's Es ist nicht mein Geburstag, frau.
Est isn't a word, and they don't use fraulein anymore. They just say frau. [/germangrammarnazi]

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Meanwhile as The Faceless Evil closes in on the hapless, sleeping, populace...
Across town in a shanty one-bedroom, an old woman feeds her parakeet.

やったぁ～～～!!

I just finished my kanji book. Now I'll be well-prepared to handle almost any kanji the Japanese language can throw at me. :3

- Kef

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I took six years of Spanish in high school. I'm decent, especially at reading, but I still can't understand natural speakers most of the time. I can't take it in college due to lack of time, which is a shame, so my formal education is over. Hopefully I don't just stop cold now. I also think it'd be cool to learn Japanese, since it as a language fascinates me and seems to make a lot more sense than English and Spanish do, but I don't want to try until I can speak fluent Spanish, which I doubt will ever happen.

Note: My favorite Spanish phrase is "chupa mantequilla de mi culo." Apparently that's extremely rude?

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I tried getting into Japanese. I got as far as memorizing most of the unaccented hiragana. I guess I should finish that and move onto katakana. Does anyone know where to go next?

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SnowyFox - well, you could always do what I do and make flash cards using Anki. What I do is I put an English sentence on one side and the Spanish sentence on the other, translating whole sentences at a time. (They should be relatively short sentences, though, and shouldn't use too much unfamiliar vocabulary or grammar at once.) Just open the program at least once a day and drill yourself and add new cards now and then. It doesn't take all that much effort and you'll ensure that your Spanish steadily improves even while you're not studying it in school. In fact, I've done much better studying Spanish on my own than I've ever done in school.



I wouldn't say that. There's a lot of things in Japanese that are more logical than Spanish or English, but there's a lot of things that are less logical, too. And kanji is about the least logical writing system ever conceived, especially with what the Japanese have done to it. (In Chinese, the kanji -- they call 'em hanzi in Chinese -- can each be pronounced only one way with a handful of exceptions. In Japanese, almost every single kanji has two ways it can be pronounced, and many have more than that!)



It certainly doesn't sound very nice...



That's a good way to start, yes. What I did was I drilled myself on hiragana and katakana every time I needed something to do, and I'd usually test myself maybe once a night (less often once I got better at it). It's a bit of work, but it's not all that bad, and it's a walk in the park compared to kanji.

Once you got them down, there's all sorts of different approaches you can try, but most people would probably recommend you use a textbook like Genki or Japanese for Everyone. Me, I did Heisig's Remembering the Kanji to get the kanji out of the way, but that can take quite a while and you won't be learning any real vocabulary or grammar while you're doing it.

- Kef

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*chuckle* After throwing that through a translator, I can see why

I'm still al spanishy, but I'm done learning it now. I don't have any language requirements for my major at school, so anything I do from now on is on my own terms and for fun. I'll probably try and pick up at least German and Japanese eventually.

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I am but my internet connection is down.

I just bought harry potter in russian and italian. And I found a russian tutor in town.

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does anyone know a website that can help me learn german?

(it can be just standard german, but a site that could help me learn multiple variants is best)

@johnathon: if fraulein isn't used anymore, why did we have to learn the word in languages?

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In case you want to read books that were written before. Or in case you want to be rude.

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