Bokhinia

TuesdayTunes #27

Lm3allem لمعلم by Saad Lamjarred سعد لمجرد

(Morocco; Arabic)

TuesdayTunes #26

-40° by Rauf

(Azerbaijan; Azerbaijani)

TuesdayTunes #26

Տանեմ Բերեմ Tanem Berem by Սյուզի Մելիքյան Suzy Meliqyan

(Armenia; Armenian)

When I see a title like this I usually stay miles away from it, and with good reason - most things that make such claims are clickbaity crap that don’t teach you anything.

But this was possibly the single best language learning video I’ve ever seen. Not that I watch all that many language learning videos... but you get the idea!

Well I watched the whole thing. Surprise surprise I did not magically become fluent in Mongolian, but I now know enough grammar to make a huge number of sentences in Mongolian using only a dictionary to add the vocabulary.

In the video she covers pronouns; several verb endings: infinitive, past simple, present simple, present continuous, future, want, imperative and polite imperative; basic word order, the comitative, negation and possessives. Which is a pretty solid grounding. I was also impressed by the way vowel harmony was introduced - no explanation of the concept to get you all worried and confused, just diving straight in and treating it like it’s nothing.

One thing I would have liked would be a transcription into Cyrillic, as this grammar-first approach to language learning is most suited to writing first, since you don’t usually have a dictionary to hand when having a spoken conversation.

TuesdayTunes #25

ポニーテールとシュシュ Ponytail to Shushu by AKB48

(Japan; Japanese)

The video has a lot of not-song, so here is an audio-only version.

AKB48 are one of the most famous Japanese girl groups. Their name comes from Akihabara, an area of Tokyo, and 48, for the 48 original members. Yep, you are reading correctly - that’s forty-eight. Now they’re up to around 140. They are split into several teams, with rotating membership - group members join and then eventually ‘graduate’ from the group. They have their own theatre in Akihabara where they perform every night (hence the large membership and multiple teams), and fans can vote for the members they want to sing the next single.

TuesdayTunes #24

Bir Minik Mikrofon by Ceza

(Turkey; Turkish)

TuesdayTunes #23

Rannamaja by Getter Jaani & Koit Toome

(Estonia; Estonian)

Definitely my favourite Estonian song!

I briefly studied some Catalan last year, because... well, that’s the kind of thing I do. I only studied it for a few days, so I’m not quite fluent, but here are some decent free online resources I found, if anyone’s interested:

http://guardia.cat/mary/curs/articles.html

http://ielanguages.com/catalan.html

http://www.cursdecatala.com/en/catalan-lessons/catalan-grammar/

http://eihek.com/catalan/grammar/0-main.html

http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Catalan/Grammar/index.html

I like posts with colour so have a flag

TuesdayTunes #22

외톨이야 I’m A Loner by CNBLUE

(South Korea; Korean)

TuesdayTunes #21

Мало Тебя (Malo Tebya) by Serebro

guise pls note i like it for the actual song not the video!! u believe me rite?? guys????