general Language exchange

[SasQ 1,346]

Idea:  Let's make a place where we can exchange languages I teach you mine, you teach me yours

To make it even more simple and fun, I already made some effort to prepare a bunch of pictures for you that you can use as an educational device Just take one of the pictures below and replace my texts with ones in your language, then post them here so that other people could learn your language. (I intentionally used solid colour backgrounds under those texts so that you could simply use a colour picker and paint the same colour over my texts, then replace it with your texts easily.)  My hope is that after a while this thread will become a great learning place for people (and ponies) who want to learn languages :>

Let's start with something simple, yet useful: colours.
Why colours? Because they can be later connected with nouns to describe them, and that way you will be able to learn how to make the simplest grammatical construct in every language: noun phrases. (This will probably be in the next part.) Colours are one of the most primitive mechanism that allows us to distinguish objects from each other (e.g. apples from an apple tree), and their set is usually limited (unless you're a girl and you know millions of colours :J but let's save that level of complexity for later ).

I can't provide you the audio, so under each image I also posted the texts as plain text that you can copy into your favourite text-to-speech software for that particular language (e.g. you can use Google Translate – they have audio samples for some languages; or you can use an online dictionary – those have audio samples sometimes as well; or Wiktionary).

OK, that being said, let's now learn some colours with Rainbow Dash – the most colourful pony in Equestria

Colours in Spanish:

(rojo, naranja, amarillo, verde, azul, morado, blanco, gris, negro, marrón, rosa, los colores)

Colours in Mandarin Chinese:

(红色，橙色，黄色，绿色，蓝色，紫色，白色，灰色，黑色，咖啡色，粉红色，色)

Colours in Polish:

(czerwony, pomarańczowy, żółty, zielony, niebieski, fioletowy, biały, szary, czarny, brązowy, różowy, kolory)

Also, if anyone is interested in becoming "language pen pals" with me, feel free to hit my mailbox   (Although I prefer talking in this thread, because that way other people could benefit from that as well.) I also sometimes appear in Pony.Town as TeachMeUrLanguage and talk with ponies there. Or you can go to my Discord room specially made for language exchanges

You can also share your ideas about what would you like to see next in this thread, what stuff you would like to learn, what languages you are interested in, etc. I'll add them to the poll above.

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by SasQ
Added some additional contact methods

[Brony Number 42 8,672]

I find it unsettling that the topic to learn language has bad grammar: 

23 minutes ago, SasQ said:

TeachMeUrLanguage

I would like to learn Japanese.

[SharpWit 2,315]

In high school I signed up for German as both my main and my back up because I was stubborn like that. What I didn't know is despite listing a class for it, it actually wasn't available. So they stuck me into Mandarin for 2 weeks before getting me moved to French. I didn't pay much attention in the former since I was only put their temporarily, amd I wasn't enthusiastic for French either, so didn't do great. That summer I moved and my new school did offer German but I needed two years of language and already spent one in French, so I continued it unenthusiastic. That being said, my teachers made for a largely enjoyable atmosphere, and I'm grateful for the experience.

I really only recall a few things, mainly counting to 12 and saying my name, along with a handful of the rules and key words.

[Stardust 639]

I can help with anyone who wants to learn Japanese. Maybe not the grammar but phrases and letters and that.

I am still learning like a lot of the kanji but I did technically learn up to maybe year 4 lower school kanji plus some extras (and I know some chinese characters too but not very good), though yeah I forgot a lot of it. Kanji is very hard  

 

Also it be fun to learn some Swedish maybe

Edited July 8, 2020 by flurry

[SasQ 1,346]

1 hour ago, Rebel Brony 42 said:

I find it unsettling that the topic to learn language has bad grammar: "TeachMeUrLanguage"

That's because in Pony.Town there is a limit for a character name's length, I had to squeeze it that way. The "Ur" is supposed to be read as "Your". Not my fault that this stupid limitation is there   Also keep in mind that English is not my first language, so in case you found some other typos or bad grammar, just correct me. I'm not here to teach you English, though, so I don't see how could this be a problem. English will only be used as a "common ground", since most people here are Egnlish-speaking. (And probably for many of them English is not their first language either.)

1 hour ago, Rebel Brony 42 said:

I would like to learn Japanese.

すごい    I'll do Japanese colours next

However, Japanese might be a bit hard for starters, mostly due to their complex writing system (three different character sets used at the same time!). Unless we settle on romaji transcription for now (it uses Latin letters).

1 hour ago, SharpWit said:

In high school I signed up for German as both my main and my back up because I was stubborn like that.

Das ist großartig

1 hour ago, SharpWit said:

So they stuck me into Mandarin for 2 weeks

这也非常好 我也说汉语一点儿。

1 hour ago, SharpWit said:

before getting me moved to French

Hahah, so you're a real polyglot now, monsieur Chapeau bas!

1 hour ago, SharpWit said:

That being said, my teachers made for a largely enjoyable atmosphere, and I'm grateful for the experience.

That's great. Because teachers in public schools (and private language schools too, unfortunately) are usually pretty bad at teaching languages :q I mean, come on, how messed up it has to be to have people learn a language for several years and still being unable to talk? Schools usually don't teach languages, but about languages :q They teach you grammar rules and memorizing vocabulary lists, but not thinking in a language and speaking it fluently. Same could be said about language courses, even those paid ones – they mostly focus on parroting phrases instead of understanding what they mean and learning how to come up with your own sentences.

That's why I rather learn my own way, and it works much better (and faster). I learn the way infants do: by listening to people talking and trying to talk with them. I start with simple yet useful & flexible vocabulary that allows me to make my own sentences, I ask people many questions, I watch my favourite cartoons & movies dubbed in foreign languages etc. I make my own vocabulary lists, with pictures & stuff, full of words that I find useful, such as colours, numbers, body parts, names of rooms & buildings, animals, plants, professions... I make separate lists for verbs, starting from the most important ones, such as "to be", "to have", "to do", "to go", "want", "can", etc. (those are often used in grammatical constructs of tenses), the one related to senses, like "to see", "to hear", "to feel", "to smell", "to taste", then "to think", "to read", "to write", "to speak", "to study" etc. Another very useful group of words is prepositions – there's not many of them, but they're very powerful, because they allow me to describe relations between objects in space and time, asking for directions etc.

And that's also the direction I plan for this thread to go. Random language exchanges might not be much helpful if the people you speak with use complex grammar and advanced vocabulary instead of "baby talk" which is much better suited for beginners. They're also not language teachers, so they might not know good teaching methods or how to explain stuff. And if you don't have any language in common, it might be hard to explain stuff without any common ground. That's why I prefer "directed" language exchanges like the one above: I know what words and structures I need to be able to speak in a new language, and I know which learning methods work well, so I prepare my "slides" in such a way in order to squeeze as much useful information from the other person as I possibly can, even if she can't teach well :>  So don't worry if you are not a good language teacher – let me handle this for you (and other people who will participate in this thread in the future).

22 minutes ago, flurry said:

I can help with anyone who wants to learn Japanese.

どうもありがとうございます

24 minutes ago, flurry said:

Maybe not the grammar

24 minutes ago, flurry said:

but phrases and letters and that

Sounds good enough :J

25 minutes ago, flurry said:

I am still learning like a lot of the kanji but I did technically learn up to maybe year 4 lower school kanji plus some extras

That's impressive anyway.

25 minutes ago, flurry said:

Kanji is very hard

Everything is hard until it becomes easy And it becomes easy when you figure out the pattern :>
Kanji / Hanzi characters have a pattern in them too. They might seem complex when you look at them as a whole. But in fact they are made of simpler elements, often called "radicals" or "roots". Some of them are there just for the sound (like in a rebus), others are there for their meaning, to distinguish between two characters that sound the same or similar. If you look for those elements and their meanings, it may help you with understanding what the entire characters mean, and remember them better. That's how I do it. I once took grade 1 and 2 Kanji charts and used colours to mark shapes that looked the same (that was before I learned about radicals). Here's how it looked like:

(If it is a bit blurry, it's not my fault, it's the forum that does that; just click on the image and it should appear in better quality).

 

[SasQ 1,346]

Ok, since you know the names of colours in several languages now, let our paid actresses show you how you can say that you are a pony, and which type of pony you are

These are all languages I remember seeing people speaking in Pony.Town. If you speak a language that has not been used yet in my picture, please provide your translations and I'll add them there

Note: I wasn't sure if I used the correct articles, because in some languages they match the gender of a pony and you can use both masculine and feminine version depending on the gender of the pony, in other languages they match the grammatical gender of a word and they're fixed, no matter the gender of the pony. So if you are a native speaker of any of these languages and you spotted any mistakes in the picture above, please tell me and I'll correct them.

Now when you know colours and names for the types of ponies, can you guess how to say things like "an orange pony" or "a violet Unicorn"? Go on, try it! 

(Edit:  Applejack, what are you looking at? :q  You're not thinking of munching on Rainbow Dash's tail again, are you? :g  )

Edited July 8, 2020 by SasQ

[Stardust 639]

16 hours ago, SasQ said:

すごい    I'll do Japanese colours next

However, Japanese might be a bit hard for starters, mostly due to their complex writing system (three different character sets used at the same time!). Unless we settle on romaji transcription for now (it uses Latin letters).

Start with hiragana and katakana? That's what the kids have lol Though yeah a lot of textbooks for western people use romaji for phrases and such because they just want to get down to the speaking. Romaji is also useful if you want to type in Japanese on a computer and knowing that can be important (and I only learnt that later on oof)  it depends what aspect is important.

A friend of mine learnt all the hiragana letters pretty well and quickly by practising each one and begun to be able to read words knowing what sound each one was.

I learnt hiragana from hiragana charts kinda like u do with the alphabet. And for each letter there was a  different tasty food yos. There is also being able to sing the letters out loud kinda well its more just saying them out in order of their groups. Like あいうえお (first line)。And the way to remember the order of the groups of letters is like あかさたなはやらわ。

 

16 hours ago, SasQ said:

-snip-

Honestly the english to Japanese kanji confuses me more hahha yeah but that's as I learnt Japanese as a Japanese kid would do. Some of these english words trip me up but I think it is pretty useful because u sort of get the essence of the word especially for the kanji which are usually used in compounds. Maybe I should go back and learn English also lol xD

In the later textbooks I used english translations were included for sentences.

But yeah what makes kanji so hard is that there are so many lol, Id learn a set of kanji only to forget the older ones.  The radicals do help a lot yeah organising things and are pretty good. 

I'm taking a new approach which is to develop reading recognition first of kanji (more useful to me anyway). And learning kanji through compounds and themes. Duolingo isn't too bad for helping with that at least to start with and I learn better with context. Previously teaching methods I used mainly consisted of these books where u just draw the kanji over and over again. Oh and now I remember how my mum used to tell me plz draw each kanji 10 times or i will be angry ( 怒る) :0  But now i'm kinda learning Japanese for fun and if I do go and live there ever it be useful. Maybe I can also read manga without furigana (hiragana on top if kanji) lol

The kanji tree app is also good. I know some people use flash cards but I don't tend to use them much lol

For people starting, the kanji for first grade are pretty good as they have limited strokes so they should be easier to pick up. The mountain, tree and person and that look similar to the real thing haha at least if u stare at it long enough xP one tree is 木 Two trees 林 is woods three trees 森 is a forest, and a tree with a line 本 is a book.

Even Japanese people be like kanji むずかしい haha. But well I think they are referring to the kanji u get a lot later on lol 

Oh and yeah radicals in Japanese have a certain names for the position they occupy. 

I agree though I don't really like the way they teach languages in most schools. I mean maybe some people learn like that but I certainly don't learn too great ;P

14 hours ago, SasQ said:

Ok, since you know the names of colours in several languages now, let our paid actresses show you how you can say that you are a pony, and which type of pony you are

These are all languages I remember seeing people speaking in Pony.Town. If you speak a language that has not been used yet in my picture, please provide your translations and I'll add them there

Note: I wasn't sure if I used the correct articles, because in some languages they match the gender of a pony and you can use both masculine and feminine version depending on the gender of the pony, in other languages they match the grammatical gender of a word and they're fixed, no matter the gender of the pony. So if you are a native speaker of any of these languages and you spotted any mistakes in the picture above, please tell me and I'll correct them.

Now when you know colours and names for the types of ponies, can you guess how to say things like "an orange pony" or "a violet Unicorn"? Go on, try it! 

(Edit:  Applejack, what are you looking at? :q  You're not thinking of munching on Rainbow Dash's tail again, are you? :g  )

Ooh traditional Chinese and simplified too. 

Edited July 9, 2020 by flurry

[Suukorak 354]

I'm interested in Japanese too, and I can teach basic French, if anyone wants to know.

On 7/9/2020 at 3:59 AM, flurry said:

don't really like the way they teach languages in most schools

Agreed there. I had immersion school in elementary, and "regular" language class after. The "regular" class always felt stilted in comparison. Not to mention boring.

[Twilight-Sparkle17 230]

Although I took French in high school, I don't feel as though I learned it enough to use it conversationally as I never practiced what I learned. I also feel as though that's the reason that I haven't held onto what I already knew (in terms of speaking the language). Because of this, I really want to take a stab at trying to learn the language.

[Suukorak 354]

7 hours ago, Twilight-Sparkle17 said:

[wants to learn French]

All righty then! I'll start, like SasQ did, with basic colors:

Rouge

Orange

Jaune

Vert

Bleu

Violet

Noir

Gris

[Blanc]

Rose

(les couleurs)

 

I'll also throw in basic pronouns:

moi (me) / je (I)

tu (you)

il (him)

elle (her)

nous (us)

vous (you, plural or formal)

ils (them, masculine)

elles (them, feminine)

[Dreambiscuit 6,879]

So far, learning Japanese has been fun and engrossing. Learning hiragana and katakana were pretty simple, but kanji is going to take a while just because of the sheer volume. There are some nice tools out there, like Kanji Pict-O-Graphics and A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, which associate images and significance with the kanji. And Kanji From Zero is a nice resource as well. The Japanese From Zero book series has been my go-to source that’s worked best for me, but I’m combining many different sources for many different angles. I’ll focus more on kanji after I get better at basic grammar and structure. Then I can put things into context and hopefully have better results overall.

[Splashee 28,471]

The Japan language, used on logos, company names, video game characters etc. It's more squary somewhat. Must sound really cool!

[ExplosionMare 17,866]

Russian isn’t on here 

I know I’ll never learn it but I think Russian accents are really cool

 

(If anyone wants a few really good English lessons or some average French lessons I can do that, since this is Language Exchange)

Edited July 12, 2020 by ExplosionMare
Added stuff

[Vefka 1,492]

8 hours ago, ExplosionMare said:

Russian isn’t on here 

I know I’ll never learn it but I think Russian accents are really cool

I'm surprised how many people want to learn Russian

[SasQ 1,346]

On 7/11/2020 at 5:58 AM, Suukorak said:

All righty then! I'll start, like SasQ did, with basic colors

Nice!   I'll convert it to picture form later for consistency to keep the same format for all languages.

On 7/11/2020 at 5:58 AM, Suukorak said:

I'll also throw in basic pronouns

C'est magnifique!   (or should I say MANE-ifique? )
You beat me to it, since personal pronouns are what I planned to do next  but it took me some time to prepare the appropriate pictures...
Oh well, let me then reënact those with the help of our paid actors

French personal pronouns
(If they don't show up immediately, just wait for a while until they load. For better quality, click on the image.)

Please correct me in case "ils" could be used to male-only groups or something (I wasn't sure about that one).
Also, I had to think how can I express the idea of polite forms in my pictures. Hmm... Maybe if I used Princess Celestia for that? What do you think?
 

Here's the same with Chinese personal pronouns.
This time only simplified Chinese (sorry Taiwanese people, I had to, saving resources & stuff )

(Textual version for copy-pasting:  我  ,  你  ,  他  ,  她  ,  我们  ,  你们  ,  他们  ,  她们  )

And here's the same in my native language, Polish:

(Textual version:  ja, ty, on, ona, ono; my, wy, oni, one)
There's one more pronoun in Polish, for neuter singular: "ono", usually used for children or animals (I know, what a category :q ), but I wasn't sure how to depict it so that it was clear enough what does it mean. Maybe I could use Pound Cake or Pumpkin Cake for that? What do you think?

I'm not sure how many pictures I can paste in one post, so I'll put just these three, and meanwhile I'll pepare some more to paste in my next post.

On 7/11/2020 at 8:45 AM, Dreambiscuit said:

There are some nice tools out there, like Kanji Pict-O-Graphics and A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, which associate images and significance with the kanji. And Kanji From Zero is a nice resource as well. The Japanese From Zero book series has been my go-to source that’s worked best for me, but I’m combining many different sources for many different angles.

Wow! That's a nice list of valuable resources! Thanks!

On 7/12/2020 at 2:22 AM, ExplosionMare said:

Russian isn’t on here 

You're right, I totally forgot about Russian, despite the fact that it's one of the most popular languages in Pony.Town (so popular that they had to make separate servers for Russians from what I remember). I added it to the poll. Unfortunately I don't feel competent enough to teach you Russian, so unless some Russian people will appear willing to teach us, I can't help you with that, sorry.

Next time I plan to introduce the "to be" verb which is also very important and useful for the beginning, and hopefully we will finally be able to combine all that knowledge into some simple sentences and our learning will pay off   But in case you wanted to learn something specific, please tell me, I'll see what I can do.

Also, feel free to post examples from your languages, I'm not the only actor here, it is supposed to be an exchange

(P.S. Poor Applejack... I think she's not getting paid enough for her effort :q )

Edited July 13, 2020 by SasQ

[ExplosionMare 17,866]

8 hours ago, SasQ said:

 

 

You're right, I totally forgot about Russian, despite the fact that it's one of the most popular languages in Pony.Town (so popular that they had to make separate servers for Russians from what I remember). I added it to the poll. Unfortunately I don't feel competent enough to teach you Russian, so unless some Russian people will appear willing to teach us, I can't help you with that, sorry.

Next time I plan to introduce the "to be" verb which is also very important and useful for the beginning, and hopefully we will finally be able to combine all that knowledge into some simple sentences and our learning will pay off   But in case you wanted to learn something specific, please tell me, I'll see what I can do.

Also, feel free to post examples from your languages, I'm not the only actor here, it is supposed to be an exchange

(P.S. Poor Applejack... I think she's not getting paid enough for her effort :q )

Okay, here’s an example:

English: I love birds.

French: J'adore les oiseaux.  (pronounced “way-zoo”)

[DubWolf 15,747]

Kinda useless knowing anything other than English or Spanish around here . Mandarin would be useful as there’s over a billion people in the world that speak it and there’s likely more speakers of it than French anywhere (I took a French class for 5 years but then didn’t really ever use it again.

19 minutes ago, ExplosionMare said:

Okay, here’s an example:

English: I love birds.

French: J'adore les oiseaux.  (pronounced “way-zoo”)

Isn’t it “wah-zoh”  ?(Like low, not like bow in “bowing”. Oof. Dang it english, why can’t you be phonetically consistent with spellings?!)

Like this  

 

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by WWolf

[ExplosionMare 17,866]

55 minutes ago, WWolf said:

Kinda useless knowing anything other than English or Spanish around here . Mandarin would be useful as there’s over a billion people in the world that speak it and there’s likely more speakers of it than French anywhere (I took a French class for 5 years but then didn’t really ever use it again.

Isn’t it “wah-zoh”  ?(Like low, not like bow in “bowing”. Oof. Dang it english, why can’t you be phonetically consistent with spellings?!)

Like this  

 

 

Yeah you’re probably right

[Vefka 1,492]

12 hours ago, SasQ said:

Unfortunately I don't feel competent enough to teach you Russian, so unless some Russian people will appear willing to teach us, I can't help you with that, sorry.

Sorry, when I posted here last time I forgot about exchange thing

You already have here colors in Russian, so I'll tell you about basic pronouns

Textual: я, ты, он, она, мы, вы, они

Meanings are almost the same as in Polish (as well as pronunciation, but I'm not sure), but "они" refers to a group of people/ponies in general (so it doesn't matter if the group has males or females), also "вы" is a polite form of "ты" (you). If "Вы" starts with uppercase, it means polite "ты", if "вы" starts with lowercase, it's the pronoun you use to talk to a group of people. But a very few people actually use this rule, so it's meaning almost always defined contextually. Also there's pronoun "оно" which is used to tell about: an object that you can't identify, creature that has no gender or it you want to emphasize your hostility to the animal/person. In all other cases both animated and inanimated things are refered as "он" or "она" (he or she), eg bed is она, table is он. If you want to refer a bunch of objects, you use "эти" ("они" is used only for living creatures).

Hope I helped somebody. Feel free to ask anything else!

[SasQ 1,346]

3 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

You already have here colors in Russian

Colours in Russian? Did I miss something? So far we have colours in: Polish, Spanish, French (with no picture), and Mandarin Chinese.
But you can supply Russian mod of my template if you will

3 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

in Russian, so I'll tell you about basic pronouns

Now that's what I'm talking about! I provided the template, people use it to share their languages with others. Soon I'll give you more.
Прекрасно! Cпаси́бо 

3 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

Meanings are almost the same as in Polish (as well as pronunciation, but I'm not sure)

Yup, if you changed every Latin letter in Polish pronouns to their Cyrillic counterparts, they would turned out to be the same. And the meanings are the same too.
But the pronunciations are slightly different, due to the phenomenon called Akanye. If the "o" letter is not accented, it is pronounced pretty much the same as "a".

3 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

also "вы" is a polite form of "ты" (you)

Yup, it was that way once in Polish too, but now it remained mostly in old dialects of village people.
This phenomenon can be found in many other European languages: when people want to refer to a stranger or to someone who has more authority (e.g. someone older, or a boss, or a leader), they avoid speaking directly to them, and switch to pronouns that are more indirect. There are two possibilities here:
1. They artificially pluralize, using 2nd person pronouns, making an illusion that they're referring to a group of people instead of just one person, hiding that person in that "artificial crowd", so to speak, to be more indirect.
2. They speak of someone in 3rd person, as if they were talking about the authority with someone else (who isn't really there). That way they pretend that they're not talking directly to that authority, but letting the authority "overhear" it anyway and react. (I call this one "Trixie mode", from obvious reasons Trixie talks in third person when she's in her Great and Powerful persona because, well, it is a persona – an artificial personality she made for herself to cover up for her insecurities. Talking about it in third person comes from the dissociation.).

Some languages may also have a different set of pronouns for polite forms, or they add some "decorations" around the normal ones to make it sound more "praise-ish" ;J

In Polish nowadays we combine speaking in 3rd person with words "Pan" / "Pani" (Mr., Mrs.) if we are talking to unknown people or people in power.

3 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

If "Вы" starts with uppercase, it means polite "ты", if "вы" starts with lowercase, it's the pronoun you use to talk to a group of people.

Nice, good to know :>
In Polish, we capitalize "you" as well when we refer to someone directly (e.g. in a letter) to honour them.
In English & American, on the other hoof, they capitalize the 1st person ("I") instead. It's kinda telling, don't you think?
Fortunately, that egotism ends there, since when talking about yourself and someone else, you usually put yourself at the end of the list, like in "My sister and I". (Unless you're one of those people who don't understand cases and say "My sister and me" in subject position :q  It would be OK when in direct object position.)

3 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

If you want to refer a bunch of objects, you use "эти" ("они" is used only for living creatures).

Interesting! I didn't know this one.

6 hours ago, WWolf said:

Kinda useless knowing anything other than English or Spanish around here .

What do you mean?

6 hours ago, WWolf said:

Mandarin would be useful as there’s over a billion people in the world that speak it and there’s likely more speakers of it than French anywhere

Appeal to popularity might be a good argument for learning some language (if you're looking for a language that will allow you to communicate with many people), but I don't think it should be used as an argument for discouraging people from learning some language. Whatever language you learn, even the most rare one, will always help you communicate with some people that otherwise you would be unable to talk with. And if the language is rare, it also makes you rare, because there's not many people then who would be able to do your job For example if you know English as your second language, there's billions of people who can do the same. But if you know Zulu, or Xhosa, or Inuit, or Navajo, there's not many people who could replace you and you can earn a lot of money or become very important

Moreover, languages can be thought of as one huge tree, with branches. There are groups of languages that are very similar, because they come from the same stem somewhere in the past. Knowing one of them makes it easier to learn other languages from the same stem (e.g. when you know Polish, it's pretty easy for you to learn Russian or Czech, because they're all from the Slavic branch; if you know Spanish, it's pretty easy to learn Italian or Portuguese, and quite easy to learn French, because they're all based on Latin; English and German are also pretty close to each other, since Old English was from the Germanic branch).
Learning a language from outside of your branch can be an eye-opening experience, because then you usually find that languages from other branches use different ways to express the same things. You learn how different people solved the same problems with different tricks and grammatical constructs.
For example, when learning Indonesian, I found that they have two different ways of saying "we": "kami" is exclusive (it includes you and your friend, but not the other people you're talking to) while "kita" is inclusive (it includes the people you're talking to). This is something I was always missing in Polish, because when my mom says: "Here we have a cake", I never know if by saying "we" she meant me and her (in that case I get the cake too), or her and my dad (in which case I don't have the cake :q ). In Indonesian there would be no confusion: "Kami punya kue" would mean that I don't get the cake, while "Kita punya kue" would mean that I get the cake too.

There's many languages being spoken in Pony.Town, for example. But once I saw people speaking Indonesian, I just knew I have to learn at least some basics of it to be able to speak with those people, because Indonesian seemed so different from all the languages I knew. When I started talking to Indonesian people and asking them to tell me some words in their language, then noting them down, I quickly started to see patterns and their language turned out to be in fact pretty easy to learn, and quite simple. And when I then started combining those words they gave me into sentences and speaking back to them, they were shocked: "WOW! How can you speak my language?! It's HARD!"

When you speak someone's language, you can see a huge difference in the way they treat you. You're no longer a stranger, you're one of them. They open up, speak more freely. It's amazing. It is that feeling of connection with the speaker that makes me want to learn more and more languages, even some exotic ones. And that's also why I started this thread: to let other people experience that feeling too and show them that learning languages of other people doesn't have to be hard (schools make it way too complicated and boring!). I hope it will fulfil that purpose.

Edited July 13, 2020 by SasQ
typos

[DubWolf 15,747]

3 minutes ago, SasQ said:

Appeal to popularity might be a good argument for learning some language (if you're looking for a language that will allow you to communicate with many people), but I don't think it should be used as an argument for discouraging people from learning some language. Whatever language you learn, even the most rare one, will always help you communicate with some people that otherwise you would be unable to talk with. And if the language is rare, it also makes you rare, because there's not many people then who would be able to do your job For example if you know English as your second language, there's billions of people who can do the same. But if you know Zulu, or Xhosa, or Inuit, or Navajo, there's not many people who could replace you and you can earn a lot of money or become very important

Moreover, languages can be thought of as one huge tree, with branches. There are groups of languages that are very similar, because they come from the same stem somewhere in the past. Knowing one of them makes it easier to learn other languages from the same stem (e.g. when you know Polish, it's pretty easy for you to learn Russian or Czech, because they're all from the Slavic branch; if you know Spanish, it's pretty easy to learn Italian or Portuguese, and quite easy to learn French, because they're all based on Latin; English and German are also pretty close to each other, since Old English was from the Germanic branch).
Learning a language from outside of your branch can be an eye-opening experience, because then you usually find that languages from other branches use different ways to express the same things. You learn how different people solved the same problems with different tricks and grammatical constructs.
For example, when learning Indonesian, I found that they have two different ways of saying "we": "kami" is exclusive (it includes you and your friend, but not the other people you're talking to) while "kita" is inclusive (it includes the people you're talking to). This is something I was always missing in Polish, because when my mom says: "Here we have a cake", I never know if by saying "we" she meant me and her (in that case I get the cake too), or her and my dad (in which case I don't have the cake :q ). In Indonesian there would be no confusion: "Kami punya kue" would mean that I don't get the cake, while "Kita punya kue" would mean that I get the cake too.

There's many languages being spoken in Pony.Town, for example. But once I saw people speaking Indonesian, I just knew I have to learn at least some basics of it to be able to speak with those people, because Indonesian seemed so different from all the languages I knew. When I started talking to Indonesian people and asking them to tell me some words in their language, then noting them down, I quickly started to see patterns and their language turned out to be in fact pretty easy to learn, and quite simple. And when I then started combining those words they gave me into sentences and speaking back to them, they were shocked: "WOW! How can you speak my language?! It's HARD!"

When you speak someone's language, you can see a huge difference in the way they treat you. You're no longer a stranger, you're one of them. They open up, speak more freely. It's amazing. It is that feeling of connection with the speaker that makes me want to learn more and more languages, even some exotic ones. And that's also why I started this thread: to let other people experience that feeling too and show them that learning languages of other people doesn't have to be hard (schools make it way too complicated and boring!). I hope it will fulfil that purpose.

All fair points  . 

Most people speak English or Spanish (or both) here  .

[SasQ 1,346]

1 hour ago, WWolf said:

Most people speak English or Spanish (or both) here  

Oh, so that's what you meant...
Yeah, that's not a surprise for me at all. But people who speak English or Spanish don't necessarily have to be British / American / Australian / Canadian, etc. because English might also be their second language, as it is for me. My hope is that in this thread they'll reveal what their first languages are and we could exchange some languages anyway .

OK, in the meantime when I'm preparing some new templates for you, I'll show you something else: a template I used to exchange Polish for French with one of my friends from France I gave him this sheet:

and another copy with blanks, and asked him to fill those blanks with French counterparts. And after a while we could already speak a little bit of each other's language He could ask me in Polish to make him some coffee, or where's the bathroom, etc. and I could do the same in French.

Here's another sheet from a language exchange with another French friend (one of the users on this forum; I wonder if he's still around?..):

(If you're French and you see any mistakes in it, please correct me, I'm still learning ;J )

And that's the direction I'd like to go with those templates. I use such templates because they allow us to focus on things that I'd like to learn first instead of going on tangents and using vocabulary that is too advanced for me at my level. It helps the other person too (the one that is teaching me) if that person is not a language teacher and doesn't know how to do that properly so that it worked well.

Here's one more thing that would help any of you interested in learning Polish, Russian or other Slavic languages; something I call the Key to Slavic Languages:

People often say that Polish and Russian are one of the most difficult to learn, because when they try to learn those languages, they approach them in the same way as English or French or Spanish: they try to learn each word alone, as a new word, in separation from others, and they find it extremely difficult, because they soon find out that there's billions of them, with different forms and endings depending on case, gender, number, mood, tense etc. And if they try studying conjugation tables, they get mad because it quickly becomes overwhelming.

But that's not the way one should learn Slavic languages! The key to Slavic languages is that they're based on a system of roots – basic stems of words that carry elementary meaning, that can then be modified by attaching all sorts of other morphemes (parts of words) that carry some meanings, but doesn't mean anything on their own. Their set, however, is finite (and that's good news! less things to learn). There's only a bunch of prefixes that you can put in front of a verb root to expand on its meaning and make it more specific. You can see most of them in the first column in my picture above, with little icons hinting on their meaning. If you know some Polish already, you can also notice that many of those prefixes can also function alone as words on their own, usually prepositions, because that's what they once were! :>  It's just that with time those prepositions started to merge with verbs and became part of them. It's kinda similar to how it works in contemporary English, with expressions such as "open up", "go on", "give up", "let down", "come over", "look for" etc. It's the same basic idea! A preposition that often appears before/after a certain verb starts to be used with that verb more frequently, and soon their combination gains a new meaning on itself. With time, it can even merge with the verb to make a new word, and there are examples of such merged combinations in English too: things like "understand" or "beyond". Slavic languages went through the same process in the past, and what you see now is the end result
The same goes with personal endings of verbs: they were once personal pronouns that could stand on their own, but then they merged with verbs. There's a trace of it in old dialects in which they're still movable and they can detach from the verb and attach to some other word or particle, for example: "Gdzie byłeś?" (Where were you?) vs. "Gdzie żeś był?". And in Serbian / Croatian / Montenegrin one can see that those endings are still present as forms of the "to be" verb, which hints at their origin. (Balkan branch is more close to the original proto-Slavic, than Polish and Russian which have more Baltic influences).

In the picture above, you can also see how the vowels in the stem are pretty much flexible – they are mostly a "carrier wave" for the consonants that constitute the actual meaning, so those vowels can change without breaking the core of the meaning. They can be stretched or shrunk when speaking fast, and they can even disappear entirely if they're not in the accented position. An example of that is a word for "dog": "pies", that in accusative changes to "psa" – the "ie" (originally a short "e") in between "p" and "s" disappears, but the consonants of the root stay intact, in the same exact order: "P·S".

Once you know this secret about roots and prefixes/suffixes, the amount of stuff you need to learn shrinks drastically! :>  Because now all you have to do is to learn ~200 roots + ~20 prefixes and endings, and then you can combine them in different ways to make 20×200=4000 new words! (Do you see now why it would be much harder if you tried to learn them one by one from a dictionary? :q )  Sometimes you can even guess a word that way, and in most cases you will be correct In the remaining cases you will say something that is not a word, but people will usually understand you anyway, because it still follows the rules of morphology and carries the meaning. They may then correct you by telling you a better, more natural way to say it.

Once I figured that out about my own language (unfortunately, even most Poles are unaware of that!), I was able to come up with words that you won't find in any Polish dictionary, and yet they're perfectly fine and every Pole will know what they mean. Sometimes even some long ones For example:
poprzeprogramowywałybyście

Here's how it can be broken into morphemes, and what each of these morphemes mean:

po·  = literally means "after", but when attached to a verb, it produces something in the lines of "I'll do it for a while, but I'll definitely finish, and after that I'll do something else".
prze· = literally means "across", but as a prefix of a verb, it means "thoroughly", or "from the beginning to the end".
pro· = this prefix is from Latin, it means "forward".
gra· = Greek root which means "to draw" or "to scratch". Think of "graphing".
·m   = Greek suffix for making a result of an action, in this case, the result of the drawing: a picture, graph (gram).
These three parts make "program" = something drawn forward, a plan, or a project.
·ow = converts it back to a verb in Polish, which means "to plan", "to program".
·yw = an infix that makes it a frequent action, repeated multiple times: "to program over and over again, multiple times".
·a = I'm not sure about this one.
·ł = sends it to the past, so far we have then: "programmed something thoroughly for a while, multiple times, then finished".
·y = indicates feminine plural.
·by = an infix that indicates subjunctive mood, that is, that we're talking about something that could have occurred, but haven't necessarily occurred; like something that we wished to occur.
·ś = indicates second person.
·cie = confirms the second person and plural.

Combining all that information, "poprzeprogramowywałybyście" means something in the lines of "You two girls would like to program something thoroughly, multiple times, until finished"

Of course this is an extremely exaggerated example, to show you the flexibility of that technique and how can it help you understand Polish language better. It's rare to see such complex words in Polish in an everyday conversation. One prefix and two or three suffixes (usually to indicate person, gender and time) are the norm.

One interesting thing about this approach is that it also allows you to see the connections with other languages (I have a theory that languages like English or French or Spanish, that grew from the Latin stem, can be traced even further back in time, because Latin and Greek weren't the first languages on Earth either – there's a point in which the Slavic branch merges with Latin branch and predates it). For example, the root G·L·D in my picture can be found in English words such as "GLaD", "GoLD", "GLaSS" etc. They all refer to stuff that is shiny because of having a polished surface. The word "glad" once meant "to shine", but now it's mostly used in a metaphorical way, "to shine with emotions" (to be happy about something or someone). Polish words "o·GLąD·a·ć" (to look at something from all directions), "wy·GLąD·a·ć" (to look outside) etc. all refer to the idea of looking, but originally they were also related to noticing shiny things, and even before that, to the act of polishing: "GŁaDz·i·ć" = to polish something; "GŁaD·ki" = polished (adjective), etc.

Another example might be the English "GueSS" (to tell out) and the Polish "GłoS" (voice, used for speaking/telling) and "GuS·ła" (fortune telling).

Look out for such connections between languages! They are your best friends in learning languages and they will help you a lot (Make sure that they're not false friends though, because some similarities might be coincidental.)

Edited July 13, 2020 by SasQ

[Suukorak 354]

On 7/13/2020 at 1:15 AM, SasQ said:

in case "ils" could be used to male-only groups

No, you got it right; "ils" is used for any group which contains at least one masculine member. Some languages have a neuter gender, but not French.

15 hours ago, WWolf said:

Isn’t it “wah-zoh”

Yes. This is the correct pronunciation.

15 hours ago, WWolf said:

not like bow in “bowing”

If you play a string instrument you'll know there's a way to pronounce "bowing" that sounds like "low". What a mess.

 

8 hours ago, SasQ said:

I like this, but I think it would benefit from a translation, so people know what's being said:

"Hello everyone!

My name is Twilight Sparkle.

I am a unicorn.

I like to read magic books.

I have many books.

I live in a library.

Also, I am French.

French is easy with My Little Pony!"

 

Here's some more on French: word order.

The basic sentence structure takes the same order as English: Subject-verb-object.

"Je mange une pomme."  "I eat (am eating) an apple."

 

However, adjectives generally come after the noun, as opposed to before in English.

"un lit doux"  "a soft bed"

There are exceptions to this rule, such as for adjectives referring to size, hence "Mon Petit Poney" for "My Little Pony"

Notice that nouns always come with an article, and that the article changes depending on the gender of the noun. We have "le/la" for "the", with "les" for both genders in the plural:

"le soleil"  "the sun"

"la lune"  "the moon"

"les étoiles"  "the stars"

We have "un/une" for "a", with "des" for plural:

"un jour"  "a day"

"une nuit"  "a night"

"des heures"  "(some) hours"

[Vefka 1,492]

12 hours ago, SasQ said:

Colours in Russian? Did I miss something? So far we have colours in: Polish, Spanish, French (with no picture), and Mandarin Chinese.
But you can supply Russian mod of my template if you will

I swear I saw somewhere here colors in Russian

Anyway, here's colors in your template

Also there are two kinds of blue, light blue - "голубой", dark blue - "синий"

12 hours ago, SasQ said:

15 hours ago, Ooredelen said:

If you want to refer a bunch of objects, you use "эти" ("они" is used only for living creatures).

Interesting! I didn't know this one.

Whoops, sorry, it's wrong, "они" and "эти" kinda mixed in my head, I probably shouldn't make posts at 1 AM

You can use "они" for both animated and inanimated things, just make sure that it's clear what you're talking about because if it's unclear, person would probably think that you're talking about some group of people (kinda "default" meaning). "эти" is simply "these".

12 hours ago, SasQ said:

Moreover, languages can be thought of as one huge tree, with branches. There are groups of languages that are very similar, because they come from the same stem somewhere in the past. Knowing one of them makes it easier to learn other languages from the same stem (e.g. when you know Polish, it's pretty easy for you to learn Russian or Czech, because they're all from the Slavic branch; if you know Spanish, it's pretty easy to learn Italian or Portuguese, and quite easy to learn French, because they're all based on Latin; English and German are also pretty close to each other, since Old English was from the Germanic branch).

And that is quite interesting thing! It's fascinating how you can understand a bit of language from the same brunch without knowing a word in it. In this video 4 native slavic speakers successfully communicate with each other without knowing each other's languages. For me the hardes one was Polish and the most understandable was Macedonian