Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian
| Message 1473 of 3737 03 March 2011 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
...when you smile every time a Deutsche Welle reporter says a foreign name, because they almost always make a decent effort to get the pronunciation right (even with difficult names like "Gbagbo" and "Yuan").
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Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian
| Message 1474 of 3737 03 March 2011 at 10:27pm | IP Logged |
...when you can correctly identify the origin of a foreign accent in the language you're studying.
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psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5592 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French
| Message 1475 of 3737 04 March 2011 at 3:16am | IP Logged |
garyb wrote:
When you're moving into a new flat and you find a book in Spanish about how to raise a baby, that the previous occupant must have left behind. Your flatmate asks jokingly if you want to keep it and use it to learn Spanish at some point in the future. For a moment you actually consider it. (This is coming from somebody who has no children and doesn't plan to have children any time soon). |
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You did the right thing. I too, like the other true language nerds, have a lot of material for languages I hope to study but, in truth, will probably never get to study. I just know that if I didn't have the materials I would definitely need them as I would suddenly feel the need to began to study that language.
Also, there is nothing more frustrating for the target languages you are studying then to not obtain a particular study guide or course that you come across, and then later, when you want it,to find that it not longer is available.
Tolkien uses a word that perfectly fits these situations. The Middle Earth word "mathom" refers to something for which you have no real or immediate use, but it is just too intrinsically valuable to throw out and so you save it.
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 1476 of 3737 04 March 2011 at 11:58am | IP Logged |
So my book with anecdotes in Albanian is a mathom, like my Georgian grammar, my violin and my old windows 95 computer. But the word "mathom" itself is not a mathom because it definitely is very useful.
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skyr Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5034 days ago 15 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English*, German, Swedish Studies: Italian, Icelandic, Czech, Slovak, Serbian
| Message 1477 of 3737 04 March 2011 at 12:08pm | IP Logged |
ReneeMona wrote:
skyr wrote:
...when you update your social network status as "is learning Icelandic with Bambi on youtube" and later realise this isn't possibly the best thing to admit to on such a site. |
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Awesome. If everyone did that I might find those sites a lot more interesting. |
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There's one for 'Bambi learns French' too!
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Shenandoah Newbie United States Joined 5028 days ago 30 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 1478 of 3737 05 March 2011 at 1:07am | IP Logged |
When the final deciding factor for buying some sort of device is that the packaging
contains your target language.
I did this today. I needed a new mouse for my computer. MicroCenter has an entire aisle
of mice. So after my preliminary filter (not wireless, not insanely expensive), they all
looked pretty much the same to me. So I took the box with French printed on it.
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LazyLinguist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5604 days ago 105 posts - 125 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 1479 of 3737 05 March 2011 at 10:27pm | IP Logged |
When you're constantly telling friends: "You, get Anki, I don't care if you don't study
languages, just get it!" or "Hey, there's a good thing called Lang-8 if you're making a
lot of writing mistakes".
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gdoyle1990 Groupie United States Joined 5621 days ago 52 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Serbian, Estonian
| Message 1480 of 3737 06 March 2011 at 1:52am | IP Logged |
Thatzright wrote:
When you're on a two day student booze cruise with your buddies to celebrate high school being over, and it brings you great joy to notice upon reading the multilingual texts on the counter of the tax free shop that the Russian preposition без is indeed used with the genitive. |
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This is what I do all the time with Russian. I seriously doubt that my professors are actually teaching me Russian until I see something used in real life. I still have my doubts, I think it's a conspiracy.
When you're actually willing to read the Twilight series in Serbian because those are the only books you were able to find that actually seemed appropriate for your level.
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