Duolingo

[richardfinegold]

I would start with a Romance language, Spanish or French, because of the similarity to English would make it the easiest. Here, Spanish is close to becoming an official second language, and I can speak a fair amount with my non English speaking patients, although it is what we call "Medical Spanish". (?Tiene dolor en su cabeza? Cuando vaya al bano por hace agua, tiene Sangre?"). (Do you have a headache? Is there blood in your urine?). These are not 100% correct but my patients seem to get it and for a few paragraphs I'm o.k., but when they want to tell me what their abuela says and their hijos in California are asking, then I get lost.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I would start with a Romance language, Spanish or French, because of the similarity to English would make it the easiest. Here, Spanish is close to becoming an official second language, and I can speak a fair amount with my non English speaking patients, although it is what we call "Medical Spanish". (?Tiene dolor en su cabeza? Cuando vaya al bano por hace agua, tiene Sangre?"). (Do you have a headache? Is there blood in your urine?). These are not 100% correct but my patients seem to get it and for a few paragraphs I'm o.k., but when they want to tell me what their abuela says and their hijos in California are asking, then I get lost.

I had a friend who ruptured his spleen in Spain. The doctors spoke little English , he little Spanish . It was only as he was leaving after examination that he managed to get a bilingual Brit to explain that he was in a huge amount of pain that they looked again and spotted the problem.

[Richard Barrett]

where the final cy is for Cymreig

Cymreig? what is that?

Someone mentioned Cyrillic - here in Serbia, it's used more or less interchangeably with the Latin alphabet. (Serbian Cyrillic has some characters that Russian doesn't have and vice versa.) The first time I visited this country I had no idea about Cyrillic, and the second time I'd taken the trouble to learn it, and had the strange experience of road signs and hoardings that had previously just been mysterious symbols now evoking sounds in my mind. The cursive version of Cyrillic, on the other hand, seems just to have been invented to confuse people.

Back on topic, a friend used Duolingo to learn enough Spanish to manage on a trip to Mexico and apparently this worked very well. On the other hand she could already speak reasonably good French, and from what I've seen Spanish doesn't seem to be a very difficult language anyway. I wish there were a Serbian/Croation/Bosnian course on Duolingo, it's still a struggle for me outside what's needed for shopping etc.

[french frank]

Cymreig? what is that?

aka Cymraeg I suppose they did intend Cy to mean the Welsh language rather than the Welsh course. I didn't complete it!

Just to add re learning Serbian etc: with duolingo, you get what you pay for. It didn't seem to me that it would take anyone much further than holiday languages - a bit better than a phrase book in that you can hear it being spoken, sort of - not actually by a native human being. But there are paid-for courses like Babbel which are better.

All I wanted was a reading knowledge and to have enough to be able to find things more easily in the GPC. And I did use Google Translate which was useful - sometimes. Even when the translation was rubbish.

[gurnemanz]

Cymreig? what is that?

Someone mentioned Cyrillic - here in Serbia, it's used more or less interchangeably with the Latin alphabet. (Serbian Cyrillic has some characters that Russian doesn't have and vice versa.) The first time I visited this country I had no idea about Cyrillic, and the second time I'd taken the trouble to learn it, and had the strange experience of road signs and hoardings that had previously just been mysterious symbols now evoking sounds in my mind. The cursive version of Cyrillic, on the other hand, seems just to have been invented to confuse people.
.

A recent BBC TV series, The Secret History of Writing, was very interesting on this topic. Kazakhstan is undertaking its third change of alphabet in the last 100 years. As part of the Soviet Union in 1929, they were switched from the Arabic script to the Latin script and in 1940 they switched to the Cyrillic alphabet. They are currently in the throes of switching from Cyrillic back to Latin.

[ardcarp]

I would start with a Romance language, Spanish or French, because of the similarity to English would make it the easiest

I'm not sure (despite many word-roots we share) that French is particularly 'similar' to English. Surely German or Dutch have more in common? But Spanish is a very widely-spoken tongue worldwide so probably more useful to learn than any other European language...apart from English, that is.

BTW, I am always amused that the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by someone called Cyril !

[Dave2002]

These are not 100% correct but my patients seem to get it and for a few paragraphs I'm o.k., but when they want to tell me what their abuela says and their hijos in California are asking, then I get lost.

Are the signs in Chicago and NY now also in Spanish? In California most signs were in both languages years ago, and there was a clear tendency in that direction as the proportion of Spanish speakers was increasing.

Some English speaking teachers also had a list of phrases in Spanish, so that if they heard them being used they would be able to discipline the students. Trouble with that approach is that if the teachers are curious enough, they learn some really offensive words and phrases. Just as in one of London's museums many years ago there was a display run by computers. One day there was a whole page of "filth" - which it turned out was one developers attempt at tracking rude input to the online query system, but someone managed to get it to show up on the screen. One or more of those developers had a very strong imagination and/or knowledge of street vocabulary.

[gurnemanz]

I did a PGCE at York and they taught us a language to teach us how to teach a language - intensive Italian from scratch. NIce idea and we all passed O Level a few weeks later. We lapped it up and sang a lot. Italian is surely the best language to sing

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Being something of coward, I've been drawn to the languages that contain fewest irregularities, like Italian and Spanish. I've been teaching myself Spanish for some time now, using the most recent Linguaphone course, though I began with an earlier course from the same company that I picked up from a charity shop for £5. I
For extra practice, I've also used the Linguaphone All Talk CDs, but this method does without any written reference material, so confusion can sometimes arise.

I went to a Welsh university, but had little real opportunity to learn the language. However, I made an effort to learn Welsh some years later, again using a (no longer available) Linguaphone course, which was excellent. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to find home courses for many of the less common languages, such as Norwegian.

[subcontrabass]

BTW, I am always amused that the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by someone called Cyril !

It is more likely that it is named after him. He seems to have invented the Glagolitic alphabet, as the first written form of Old Slavonic. Cyrillic was developed some years after Saint Cyril's death.

[french frank]

Just had an email from Duolingo - Daily Greek Reminder: Hi! Keep Duo happy! Remember that learning a language requires a little bit of practice every day.

Was earlier just investigating where the Greek notes might be for uttc, namely: https://duome.eu/tips/en/el Not intending to do the course

[Dave2002]

I wasn't so interested in languages until one of my first trips abroad, to Teneriffe, and thence to La Gomera, where we hired a car. The car didn't have a petrol gauge, and we were only there for a day. No problem, said the car hire guy down by the harbour. If you run out of petrol, pull this knob, and you'll get another gallon or so. That'll get you back. Maybe I could/should have believed him, but after driving for a while we seemed to be pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and we were not at all sure if we could get back. We had to get back to the port in time to get back to Teneriffe where we had a room in a hotel - otherwise we would have been stuck.

I had taken just a little time to try to learn some Spanish beforehand - though not much - and we had a few language books. Eventually we saw what looked like a bar (rather isolated), so stopped outside, and I looked up some of the words I thoght I might need. In I went, and not hopefully went up to the bar and said (IIRC) "¿Donde se puede comprar gasolina por aqui.?" What happened next really surprised me. I expected to be given a blank stare, or something like "no", but the man became quite excited, and went to the front of the building where he had a petrol pump - which I hadn't noticed, or expected in a bar, - so he put more than enough petrol into the vehicle to get us back to the port. The point was he didn't complain about my use of his language, though he was almost certainly sure I wasn't Spanish, but he understood enough to be able to get us what we thought we needed. At the time I was amazed. On recollection I think we also bought a sandwich as we were so grateful to him. He probably made a killing on the petrol we bought, but we were happy.

After that I became converted to trying to speak other languages. Nowadays it's quite hard though, as many people either speak English, or want to, and the days when people in France would be very aware of English people and perhaps not speak English seem to have passed. Though on another occasion in France I wanted to hire another car, and went into a car hire agency and asked - and I might have chickened out and asked - in French - if he spoke English - and I was then invited to carry on in French - as he said that he could understand well enough when I said I wanted to hire a car. I felt quite pleased on that occasion.

Hotels and even restaurants are now often hopeless for speaking the local language as so many are now staffed by students on work placement or doing hollday jobs, and they are (good for them ...but it doesn't help people like me who want to speak their language) desperate to try their English.

[ardcarp]

It is more likely that it is named after him. He [Cyril] seems to have invented the Glagolitic alphabet, as the first written form of Old Slavonic.

Thank goodness the scores of Janacek's Glagolytic Mass are transliterations! It's bad enough singing from these. Wonderful piece though, even if one movement is an organ solo of eye-watering difficulty!

[Joseph K]

I was considering starting a language learning resources thread but remembered that there was something similar not so long ago and found this.

Today I've started to (re-)learn German - I'm going to download Duolingo, but if anyone knows of any other resources likes websites or apps, that would be great.

I already have a number of books to help me (though if someone thinks a particular book is necessary, I'm all ears).

[Serial_Apologist]

One of the basics required for entry to the Prep school my father had booked me for at birth was an elementary grasp of conversational and written French and written Latin. I was sent to the Wetherby or Weatherby school, just off Gloucester Road in W8, where the French teacher, a middle-aged woman we addressed as "Madame" taught us 7-year olds the necessaries. "Madame" knew no English whatsoever - entire lessons were conducted in proper French; and it is to that that I ascribe my excellent pronunciation - of a standard of sufficient accuracy as to confound a French couple staying at a Zurich hotel where I worked in the late 1960s that I was myself French - though those abilities have probably become rusty in the meantime. They thought I said I was from Lourdes! My two 3-week stints in the South of France with a French family on a school exchange, between the ages of 14 and 16, would have not been the deciding factor in this, since young Patric insisted all the time in conversing in English with me, despite the admonishment of his parents. Getting any French accent "right" is especially difficult for an English person - the sole word Monsieur Saurat could find to test me being the Loire - the name for the French river, which even I found difficulty with the "woirrrrre" sound with its emphatic gutterals. Which leads me to conclude in rare agreement with my father that learning a foreign language, any foreign language, is best at a very early age, when the facial musculature seems more readily mouldable to the different physiognomical movements needed to be exercised - especially with Latin-based languages, as compared with Germanic ones with pronunciations closer to our own. Furthermore, this seems to prepare oneself for taking on other accents - one wonders how many early language learners have become good mimics !