Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Let's learn a foreign language!

Nice, lance. I feel the same way when I speak to someone from mainland China and they say I speak good Mandarin, for a foreigner.

I have also been learing a ittle Spanish. I go to chess club every Wednesday, and one of the guys is from Mexico City, another guy is from Argentina, and we had a guy drop by a few weeks ago who was from Columbia. The son of the guy from Argentina also speaks Spanish. I thought it was silly not to utilize this resource that has dropped in my lap.

If anyone ever needs advice on how to master the "new, improved" Modern Greek*, just let me know.
There are a lot of on-line tutorials that teach that sort of thing.


* less accents and diacritical marks and fewer exceptions to common rules .

I'm torn between trying to learn some Philippine and Chinese dialects, and just focusing on learning other languages (e.g. Japanese, French).

Granted, I'm not exactly putting a lot of effort into it, but if I did, which ones should I choose?

If I plan to live out the rest of my days in the Philippines, then dialects are the way to go. There are just so many - most of the Chinese living here speak Hokkien as well as Mandarin, and a few speak Cantonese.

Filipino is the national language, and thankfully most people know how to speak a little. However, extensive travel within the country will expose you to so many others, and it can be fun to know a little bit of Cebuano, Ilonggo, Ilokano and so on...

I finally got internet yesterday, and I also received a Russian textbook I ordered, so I am back into studying foreign languages. I still try to make my German better, and I am studying Russian, as well as French and Spanish.

Next up. let's learn some Klingon! <- kidding!

After doing this on-and-off again, I am back into boning up on Russian. I owe it to a phone app, actually. The is an app for the iphone (search for "memwords") and you will find it. It costs a little, but it has thousands of words and you can read more about it here:

http://www.memorizewords.com/

There are apps for Russian, Spanish, and French.

The cool thing about it is the games. I play the games a lot, which reinforces the words. Hangman is the one that I play the most, I think, and it also helps with the spelling.

Languages are funny. I switched my focus recently from Russian to French. I still study Russian, but am more focused on the French now. The funny thing is, I have been studying Russian on and off for about 2 years, and I still can't read a newspaper very well. In contrast, after only about 3 weeks of French, I can read a lot in a French newspaper. It help immensely that many French words are similar to ours, and French doesn't go nuts with the declension like Russian does.

I used to practice listening skills by changing the language selection on movie dvds. Works best when I'm familiar with the movie and kind of know the context.

I did get to the point in French where I stopped listening to words and just listened and even made it to the dream in French stage but all my dreams had ambiguous endings.

That's just sad. The bad French isn't even funny...

The only thing funny about it is that Archie's trying too hard. Oh well!