What sources would y'all recommend for learning these? I'd like to learn both and I'm aware that they are more or less separate languages - if Anglo-Saxon is distinct enough from Old English, I'd like a recommendation for that too.

I have no stake in which dialects I study, other than it being preferable to study the dialects with the most learning materials.

I'm writing out a postcard to a friend, and I want her to tell me everything about her vacation in Paris. She speaks *very* little French, so I'm trying to keep it simple. I also don't want to make any mistakes that she, as a learner, may copy.

"Il faut que tu me racontes tout!"
"Il faut que tu me raconte tout!"

...Which of these is right? I asked a native French speaker, but even he couldn't remember whether the "s" is present in this case or not.

Thanks a bunch! Any general rules on when to put the "s" at the end of the tu-form would be greatly appreciated as well.

Cheers,
RissaQui

Zdravo, friends!

I was wondering if someone could translate this from Bosnian to English for me, and if you were so inclined, to explain which words match approximately with which! I assume it means something like "These photos remind me of your time in Bosnia" or "Thanks for the photos, I hope you can visit Bosnia again" or something along those lines:

Puno pozdrava ,uživala sam gledajući fotografije,nadam se susretu opet u Bosni.

Hvala in advance!

Does "a couple of" in a couple of days/weeks/years and books always mean "two"?

Or could it mean "one or two"?

Thank you.

Guten Abend :)

I'm a bilingual, English/German speaking Austrian raised in the USA (by an Austrian mother/American father).
Since I was never educated in Austria  (I make annual, non-educational family visits, but that's it), my German writing skills are poor. I can read well, and speak/listen nearly perfectly, but I'm planning to attend the Universität Salzburg in two years, and poor writing skills won't get me very far there!

Now, for my question.
Does anyone know of any websites or books that have advanced German worksheets, lessons, and/or exercises?
Like supplementary classroom material for actual native-German classrooms?

Thank you very much for the time. :3
Vielen Dank!

This question has been bugging me for the past month or so but couldn't post for lack of internet, but I digress.

How correct is the following sentence (sans accents):

Yo iria mucho a la playa cuando estaba joven.

"Iria" being the Conditional and "Estaba" the Imperfect. As if you didn't alredy know.... Anyways, for me, it sounds good but I have a nagging feeling it isn't right. But I remember hearing some people, mainly older ones, using this sentence structure. I know that the correct way would be:

Yo iba mucho a la playa cuando estaba joven.

So am I right with the first sentence or should I just completely forget about every using said sentence structure. And if it is a correct form, is this typical in any other Romance languages? I remember something similar in French to say something like, "If so and so got dressed better, so and so couldn't make fun of him." I believe it was also the Conditional and Imperfect but am not sure.

What are the 20 most common consonants in the world's languages? Or where could I find this information? Could I also get a ranking of consonants? I know the most common are (in IPA) [p, t, k, m, n]. But I would like to see a large selection. Thanks.

Dear Linguaphiles,

Thanks for your kind replies. I could understand well after reading your comments last night. Here is another question, so that I will be able to understand more than anybody else, the other Japanese readers hehe. It's an old article from Business Week magazine last year.

Here is the passage;

The reasons range from filtering out schlock applications to what some observers say is putting the kibosh on applications that compete with Apple’s own offerings or those of iPhone wireless carrier AT&T. That may have been why Apple blocked Web-calling software Google Voice from the iPhone least month.


I know what happened about this Google Voice, ,the free application from Apple, AT&T and Google August last month. So I roughly understand what it said. But I can’t translate words by words. Because of some difficulties;

1) Construction of sentence; ‘range from ....to...’ Maybe because I don’t understand exactly what those mean by ‘shlock applications’, ‘observers’, ‘kibosh on applications’...
2) What is the web-calling software.

Thank you very much in advance!!

Another "How do you say"-post! Don't you just love them?!

How do you say "I'm allergic to strawberries, brazil nuts and chamomile (tea)." in your language?

I already got German: "Ich bin gegen Erdbeeren, Paranüsse und Kamille(ntee) allergisch."


Thank you very much! (and yes, it's for me and I'm allergic to all that stuff)

I have two points of curiosity about the idea of "going to"...

First off, are there languages in which one cannot employ the verb "to go" in order to express a future or near-future tense?

Secondly, are there languages which differentiate, through vocabulary, between going to [verb] and going to [place]?

Thank You All!

Hi Linguaphiles.

My colleagues are going on a visit to the Czech Republic and I wondered if someone could check one phrase I've pieced together and translate another for me, since my Czech is (for all intents and purposes) non-existent.

1. May I have 4 (train) tickets to...?
Chtěl bych čtyři zpáteční jízdenki do...?

2. How many stops are there until we get to...?
(I'm not confident enough to try this one)


Many thanks in advance!!

Hello Linguaphiles!

I'd like to ask you something about the following passage.

Google is the standard-bearer for a wide-open world of Web standards in which programmers should be able to run nearly any software on almost any computing device. From Google's perspective, the more the merrier - so long as those programs, devices, and Web sites create places for Google to sell online ads.

1) What is the standard-bearer for a wide-open world of Web standards
2) The 2nd line, 'the more the merrier' .... is that mean the more they have those contents, the merrier they get because they'll be able to get more online ads? Could some of you explain it in more flat way for me? Thank you so much in advance!

For any of you who have Peter Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics, is the content on the CD identical to the stuff on Ladefoged's website?

I just spent $85.50 (plus tax) on a used copy (ugh). The CD's unopened, and I don't want to open it to check in case I'm able to get a copy without a CD and return this overpriced one.

Thanks.

I was wondering what nicknames different languages have for babies. I know that you can have a ton of nicknames, but what are common ones? At the moment I'm looking for Swedish ones (and translations) for a story, but what others can you think of?

When I was a baby, I was nicknamed "peanut" or "pumpkin". My friends have a daughter that they call a little bear. Some others might include muffin, dear, darling, angel.

My sister is a fan of the show "wizards of waverly place" and I recently noticed that one of the actors often pronounces "the"with a short e rather than a long e  in sentences where I'm used to a long e being used. I'm in central Ontario Canada as an aside. example: "It's the only way" with "the" sounding more like thee. The actor pronounces it more like "tha' "

I'm wondering if this is simply a quirk the actor or character has or is this fairly common in American english? I know with accents from Wales and Ireland and Scotland particularly this is common in people with accents but I've never heard it happening with American english speakers unless they've immigrated or grown up with it. and then it shows up regularly wheras this seems to be a rare thing.

Anyone else seen similar things happening?

I understand there is an iPhone app, Babelshot, that can use the camera to snap pictures of text (written in Roman scripts) and then apply machine-translation.

This is pretty cool - don't know how effective - but I'm wondering if any similar feat has been accomplished for non-Roman scripts on any smartphone platform? Considering that I have no idea how to input text from Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages... this would be a particularly useful tool.

There's a Danish saying that goes: "Du kan gnave længe af min røv, før du kommer til mit hjerte." I understand it literally, but I can't grasp the actual meaning. Is it meant to imply that the speaker won't take offence no matter how long s/he is picked on, or does it have a slightly more positive meaning (i.e. "you will have to work on me for a while before I'll fall in love with you")?

Another one is: "Hvis og hvis min røv var spids og fyldt med marmelade." I have no problem with understanding this one, my question is instead about how common it is. I've heard people in Denmark say the first part, but the marmalade addition I've only seen written -- but perhaps that's simply because the initial bit rhymes when spoken?

I have been translating a narrative by an author who keeps referring to his 'fatherland', which made reflect on how alien this sounds to an English ear. 'Motherland' would seem a bit less so perhaps, but nobody ever uses that expression here either; we would say 'homeland'. How about comparable expressions in other languages? And is the choice of expression revealing in any way?

Esperanto, Klingon, Blissymbolics and 900 others: why we invent languages

PRI: The World in Words talks about the history of conlanging in short.
Article: http://www.theworld.org/2009/07/14/esperanto-klingon-blissymbolics-and-900-others-why-we-invent-languages

Podcast: http://64.71.145.108/pod/language/WIWpodcast62.mp3

"This week, a converation with Arika Okrent, author of “In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language.” Okrent, herself a linguist, tells the stories of people who dreamed up languages that would replace our own bastard tongues. She also submerges herself, Orwell-style, into the geeky world of invented language societies. The vast majority of invented languages from Lingua Ignota (c.1150) to Dritok (2007) have completely failed to take off. But they tell us much about how we think, how we do not think, and how we love to blame language for our own shortcomings."