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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6571 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 41 of 68 12 January 2015 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Celtic languages would be fun, but I've got a "globalglot" streak which makes me want to learn languages from the major cultural areas, so to speak, and Celtic is just a bit too obscure. As for Finnish, it's just too close. Even though it's linguistically weird and interesting, it's another Nordic country, which turns me off a bit. I want to go further out. Czech is also relatively close, but it's still farther than Finnish, and I can motivate it by thinking I'll get a discount on Russian for later. And Russian and Arabic are almost obligatory if I want to crown myself "globalglot". :)
As a Swede, I have very strong negative feelings towards Russia as a country at the moment, but as has been pointed out, this is an argument FOR learning the language, not against. And my reservations are with Mr. Putin and not with the people. And certainly not with the rich literary tradition. Well, as I said, I still have some time to decide, but if I do go for Czech, which doesn't seem unlikely, I'll be PM:ing you for resource links, Cavesa. :) But then I'd have to get through the Assimil course first, which will take three months. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4696 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 42 of 68 12 January 2015 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||
It used to be beyond the iron curtain, and that's what makes the difference in popularity. The Czech Republic is a much better run country than Romania is, that's not what I'm arguing (I don't think you can compare countries that easily anyways), but everything behind the iron curtain is simply much less popular because "commies" and "is poor". I remember when I visited Prague - it was fantastic. And that is my whole point - there are whole countries people just won't discover in the west because "is Eastern Europe" even though that has nothing to do with it, and especially Poland and the Czech Republic have modernized very well. Furthermore Czech history and literature is incredibly rich and varied and it is quite simply silly to say there's not enough to delve into. Yes, if you only want to watch Hollywood remake-style videos then you probably shouldn't learn Czech, but then you might as well stick with English anyway. But for my parents for example, anything east of Germany is hard for them to understand. They've been to Prague and the Czech Republic now, and to Romania, but they find those countries impossible to understand from their perspective. Whereas for me these countries are half the fun - there's a lot of gold there, but it's not handed to you on a silver platter, making it much more fun to look. In terms of reward, I haven't yet attempted Czech, but Romanian and Russian have been far more rewarding to learn than German or French in that respect. Also, I just read through a list of typically Czech things, and public transport in Prague is indeed excellent. Edited by tarvos on 12 January 2015 at 10:58am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7145 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 43 of 68 12 January 2015 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree. For better or worse, the label of "Eastern Europe" for us just sticks. It doesn't at all diminish how pleasantly surprising and rewarding a trip to any of the former Soviet satellites can be. If some of my fellow westerners want to remain ignorant and continue to think that Eastern Europe is some homogenous Russophone blob with dilapidated communist-era stuff, then hearing from me how wrong they are won't do much.
Indeed it is (among other things in the city), although I prefer overall the areas outside Prague, not to mention Slovakia. The atmosphere in Brno, České Budějovice and even Zlín are more to my liking. As for Ari's question, I'd say that he could do worse than Czech (although by the same token, he could do better with Slovak), but has he ever considered Turkish? Apart from the Latinic script and French loanwords, learning that language would stretch his mind a fair bit. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4510 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 44 of 68 12 January 2015 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Just wondering, which amazon site do you use, amazon.com? I can't find much else there than English, German, Romance Languages, Japanese, Russian and to a lower degree Chinese. Everything else has a rather poor selection, including Swedish. ePub shops have a much bigger selection in pretty much every language it seems, except the most popular languages. Have you found a way to get more out of it? As to the pop-up dictionary: are there any useful except for English and German and the Romance languages? I haven't found anything useful so far, neither for Scandinavian languages (edit: I actually have 1 useful for Norwegian) nor Finnish. I bought my kindle mainly because of the dictionary function, but it seems like Amazon doesn't want me to learn any language other than the Romance ones. If you know anything I don't that might help here, please share. Sorry for hijacking the thread like this. Edited by daegga on 12 January 2015 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6571 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 45 of 68 13 January 2015 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Nope, sorry, I'm using the same site and the same dictionaries. I haven't really used the popup dictionary for anything but French and Portuguese yet, and I'm sorry to hear it doesn't work well with other languages. I have noticed that there's no dictionary at all for Czech, except a Czech-German one (with ver bad reviews). There are a lot of dictionaries translating TO Czech, however.
As to the selection, I agree it's not huge, but I don't need that big a selection to find a book I'm interested in reading. I mostly read for learning the language, anyway, and it's not like I'm going to buy a book in Swedish. I haven't looked much outside of French and Portuguese (and a little in Spanish), either. I've got too many paper books in Mandarin and Cantonese that I need to finish before I start looking through the Kindle Store. Regarding dictionaries, though, there are instructions online on how to install your own dictionary if you can get it as a text file, which you can with the dictionaries on dict.cc. I don't know how well they handle inflections, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6571 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 46 of 68 13 January 2015 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I listened to a YouTube playlist of Czech music at work today and I think I've made my choice. I cannot resist those beautiful consonants. I might do German in parallel, but I think my next language is going to be Czech.
Then again, I still have time to change my mind … 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5370 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 47 of 68 14 January 2015 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds like I might be chiming in a bit too late... but who knows.
Quite a few people are pointing to the inevitability of German, but for a guy like you, I'm sure there will eventually come a time when German is either necessary or obvious, and it looks like that time hasn't come yet. If you want to buy some time, you could choose a quick side project, like Esperanto, sign language, Romanian, etc. This could serve as a sort of reset button, so you may better dive again. Learning a new language is a way to throw yourself into another world, so go all the way and pick something completely unfamiliar! Japanese and Thai would certainly do that. I also really like tristano’s list of "exotic" suggestions, to which you could add oddballs like Inuktitut or Estonian, for instance. A note on Japanese honorifics: it's not really the big issue it’s often portrayed to be. I initially worried about them, not wanting to offend anyone, but unless you live and work in Japan, the truth is that the Japanese can be quite kind and open to switching to a more informal register with foreigners and it’s never been an issue for me when I went there, and most definitely not when speaking to Japanese people outside of Japan. Follow your heart and best of luck on your new journey! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3814 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 48 of 68 14 January 2015 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Tadah!  Edited by Xenops on 14 January 2015 at 10:15pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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