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What languages have a lot of media? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5100 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 9 of 20 19 May 2014 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I guess that might depend upon one's definition of alot. Welsh and Louxembourgish make me wonder... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Mutant Groupie United States Joined 3911 days ago 45 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German | Message 10 of 20 19 May 2014 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Here in the United States, especially in Texas where I live, it is very easy to find resources for Spanish. Most of the major bookstores (notably Barnes and Noble) have sections for books, music and DVDs in Spanish, as do the big-box retailers like Target. You can find translations of virtually every national bestseller, and original Spanish and Latin American literature. There are innumberable Spanish television and radio stations available here locally and nationally, via regular broadcast TV and cable. In fact, if I am not mistaken, Univision, a Spanish-language television station based in the U.S., recently overtook the "big three" U.S. broadcasters (ABC, NBC, and CBS). Stations such as Univision and Telemundo even offer English subtitles for some of their soap operas (available as closed captioning). Major TV stations, such as the Disney Channel, offer Spanish dubbing for almost all of their programs (simply by pressing the "SAP" button on the remote control, or changing the language settings on your cable box), and channels like HBO have stations dedicated to nothing but Spanish language programming and Spanish dubs of some of their popular series, such as Game of Thrones. French also has a large presence, albeit there obviously aren't as many French speakers as there are Spanish speakers in Texas. But pretty much every DVD I have bought to watch dubbed in Spanish also has a French-language track. I've also found that most of the video games sold here are available with Spanish and French language tracks.
EDIT: I forgot to mention Portuguese, a language which is definitely on my hitlist! I have found that, at least here in the U.S., if a DVD has three language tracks, after Spanish and French the third is invariably Portuguese. This is true of all of my Star Trek films and TV seasons as well as my DVD of the twentieth season of the Simpsons. It's also true of video games, and I've found Portuguese language tracks in films even when only the Spanish and French language tracks were advertised on the case! Edited by Mutant on 20 May 2014 at 4:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4905 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 11 of 20 19 May 2014 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Having both of them on my "more or less active" learning list I can assure there is "enough" stuff for both languages available, even for free. TV and radio stations, online newspapers, dictionaries, courses, etc. Working in Luxembourg puts me of course in the fortunate position to actually go to a bookshop and skim through books in Luxembourgish and Luxembourgers actually do quite a lot to promote their language, though it can be hard to convince them not to switch to a "larger" language (French, German, English, Portuguese/Italian in some cases) when they notice your accent and can tell that one of them is your mother tongue ... And finding Welsh material isn't difficult either. I only today received my parcel from Amazon.co.uk containing (amongst others) 3 Roald Dahl books translated into Welsh for my Half Super Challenge (I thought I'd start with some children's books I know ...) So, yes, the materials for smaller languages like Welsh or Luxembourgish are most likely not quite as obvious as materials for wider studied languages like French, English or Mandarin, but invest a few more minutes and you'll be surprised how much you can find alone online. :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4173 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 12 of 20 19 May 2014 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I my experience, you generally get more media (and better quality media) from smaller developed countries than you do from bigger, developing countries. I'm not learning Danish, but there's massively more that interests me in that language than there is in Vietnamese, despite the latter having around 90m speakers. But if you're really willing to wade through it, there's mountains of media in any language. And certainly any language that is considered economically important tends to have a lot of stuff to help foreigners learn it. I live in Vietnam, but I find it easier to find quality German resources online than I do to find Vietnamese resources in the City. Certainly things specifically aimed at learners, anyway.
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4253 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 20 19 May 2014 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I meant "sole official language of a sovereign nation" Icelandic has a myriad of media but Erzya (that has 2-3 times the amount of speakers) does not. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4099 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 14 of 20 19 May 2014 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Even so, I tend to agree with Darklight1216 that it probably depends on your definition of "a lot". Do you want enough material to sustain your language learning process, or do you want enough material to live the language and use it in a way that's similar to how you use your native level language(s)? In Breton (which, granted, isn't an official language in any nation), I can find enough materials to learn the language ten times over. But if I'm more than just a language enthusiast, I'd better hope that my tastes correspond with the handful of people producing the media. I'd also better not be a film enthusiast or want to watch TV on a regular basis. Heck, if you have very particular tastes it can even be difficult to find media that you want to consume in significantly larger languages. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 15 of 20 19 May 2014 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
For most people, virtually all languages have enough media be it instructional material or authentic material (e.g. books, newspapers, websites). By this I mean that the choices made by people to learn languages are almost always drawn from a subset of about 10-20 languages which in turn aren't lacking in material. A couple of years ago I did a survey using Amazon.com looking for learning material to get a better sense of how languages stack up in this area. The first ten languages from that list are: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese (overwhelmingly Mandarin), Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese. The next ten languages from that list are: Korean, Persian/Farsi, Hindi-Urdu, Turkish, Vietnamese, Dutch, Malay-Indonesian, Ukrainian, and Thai. All of these languages have more than enough material for learners. Other languages may very well have a lot of material although sometimes it may escape your attention if you don't know an intermediary language (this is especially true for textbooks or dictionaries). For example, Northern Saami has a lot of material considering that roughly 15,000 people speak it, almost all of whom live in far northern Fennoscandinavia. However if you can navigate Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish websites, you can get free and legal streams of news broadcasts and children shows in the language, not to mention use courses and bilingual dictionaries published in one of those three aforementioned languages as intermediaries. Perhaps a better approach to your question would be to start at unzum's So You Want to Learn a Language since a comprehensive answer to your question depends on the experience of each person. If you had asked me about media in Northern Saami a few years ago when I started to study the language, I wouldn't have been able to provide that much stuff. In the meantime I've come across plenty of material and now say with confidence that if anyone has at least a shred of motivation to learn it, there is a lot available. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kai Newbie United States Joined 3963 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Icelandic, Greek, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Welsh, French | Message 16 of 20 20 May 2014 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks guys this has been really helpful!:D
Glad to see there's a lot of Romanian media, it's one of my favorite languages. :D
This is what I've been thinking - I'd ideally like to be able to live and use the language like how I use my native language and I'm picky when it comes to what I'll read/watch/listen to. But maybe I won't be so picky when it's in a language that interests me, I'm not sure. There's so many languages that interest me, from super common languages to quite rare ones, but I think the next couple languages I want to study are Spanish (being a Floridian, Spanish is very useful here), Welsh (probably not a whole lot of media but I love Celtic languages) and maybe Japanese (my brother is at maybe B2 in Japanese and has got me interested in it). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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