just another langblr

Never heard of it! Though I did look it up just now, and yes they do have Māori, but it says that it’s only for intermediate learners, so something to keep in mind for the future. Thanks!

I tried it with Spanish, Italian, and Irish, three languages that had different levels of content on the website. Spanish had a high level of content, Italian had a mid-to-high level, and Irish had a mid-to-low level. Spanish and Italian worked fine and I thought it was actually very helpful to see real sentences and word-by-word translations, but I ran into a lot of problems when using Irish.

Firstly, the website appears to just scalp websites for sentences and translations, so there's no guarantee that any are accurate. It somewhat has user submitted edits, but it only allows those who pay for membership to propose edits to questions and translations. I saw several Irish mistranslations/misspellings that I was unable to fix because I didn't pay.

Secondly, and this may have been a problem with Irish more than other languages, but several translations weren't literal, which is a big problem when the website's goal is to show you literal translations.

Finally, I did think the website was really good, mostly for mid-level learners, or those who aren't likely to trip up on most of the basic grammar. The problem with this is that by the time you get to this point, you probably know enough vocab to not get as much out of this site.

“The question is can we bring back some of the performative power, the intimacy, of those voices? Can we bring them back to life?” Lamberto Coccioli, the project lead and associate principal of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, said. His team will collaborate with three European contemporary music ensembles and Cambridge University’s department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. The goal is to produce musical compositions, public concerts, conference presentations, a digital audio database and a sample library.

Archaeologists have found evidence of musical instruments dating back to the Iron Age, including horns, panpipes, flutes and lyres, but Vikings and early Celts left scant written record of their tunes. Scholars are confident they know what Vikings and Celts sounded like by tracing the evolution of language and pronunciation, said Coccioli. “The knowledge is there but it’s academic knowledge and not used in artistic practice. We thought we might be able to take the source material for new compositions, not just [recreate] the raw sounds.”

This is my personal method to language studying, I thought it would be helpful. A link to a PDF can be found here 

How this works: 

Language studying consists of fours skills: writing and speaking (active skills) and reading and listening (passive skills). I have compiled a list of language learning activities that provide a comprehensive approach to those fours skills and can be useful to visual, auditory or kinesthesic learners (or a mix). 

You can set an estimate of the points you’ll get in week or day, or even try to improve a previous score. 

You can try to go though the list in order

You can print the list, stick it to the wall and throw darts at it, just have fun! 

So I’ve put a few grammar notes of this blog so far, so i thought i’d catalogue them a bit

Pronouns TA

Caol le Caol Leathan le Leathan

Mutations

Gender and Nouns

Regular Verbs

Present Tense 1

Present Tense 2

Present Tense 3

Present Tense 4

Present Tense 5

Past Tense 1

Past Tense 2

Past Tense 3

One way to classify Romance languages is by looking at what Latin verb is used to express ownership or possession. Some Romance languages express it by using either tenere “to hold” (such as Spanish, Portuguese or Neapolitan) or habere “to have” (such as Italian, Romanian or French).

Medieval Spanish uses both tenere and habere. Tenere expresses physical ownership whereas habere expresses a more abstract possession (such as hunger, thirst, fear, etc.). In later stages of the language, forms of tenere prevailed so that tener is used to express both concepts in modern Spanish. Haber however is used as the auxiliary (helping) verb to build perfect tenses.

Neapolitan uses a similar system but not with every abstract noun. Nouns such as raggiona “reason” and paura “fear” select avé, whereas physical possession select tené/ténere. Avé is also used to construct perfect tenses and express obligation, e.g. aggio visto “I have seen”, aggio ‘a ascì “I have to go out”.

Another way to categorise Romance languages is by looking at which verb is used to express ownership, build perfect tenses, and express existential statements (“there is a woman”). For example, Italian and Romanian use forms of habere for both possession and perfect tenses, but esse to express existential statements. Sardinian, Occitan and French on the other hand would use habere for all three.

Neapolitan is a special outlier: possession is expressed mainly by tenere (and only exceptionally by habere); perfect tenses are mostly built with habere (intransitive verbs however might select esse, like Italian, but not reflexive verbs); and existential statements are made with stare.

Tengo n’aniello “I have a ring”

Aggio vevuto “I have drunk” (cf. M’aggio assettato “I’ve sat down”);  Ammo juto “We have gone” (but Simmo jute)

I’m supposed to be studying some Italian, but instead, I was googling in my computer how to learn a new language (no, googling how to learn will not teach you shit, you have to sit down and learn your target language not how to do it, I know but I’m lazy.) and I came across LingoHut, and I have to share it.

I don’t know if someone ever talked about this page, but if they did is worth mentioning again.

So basically you go to the website and in the Home Page you have to choose what is your first language and what language are you trying to learn.

Once you choose it’ll take you to another page in which you have tons of lessons, for ex. In Italian, there are 109 lessons.

I haven’t checked every lesson yet but for example, the first one is greetings and such. You click that lesson and you have 16 flashcards that will show you the word in your target language and the translation, at the same time that someone pronounces the words.

Below the flashcards, you have this  ⬇️

And basically is a bunch of game, an easy matching words kind of game, some kind of tic tac toe with words, a memory game do you know the one that kids play in which they have to find the matching pictures? Same but with words and lastly a listening and matching game.

Below the bar of the games, we have the vocabulary list of the words we are taught in that lesson, and you can click the word and listen the pronunciation.

In the end, you have a bunch of the next lessons.

The lessons vary from the content it can be greetings, numbers, health stuff, office words, computer terminology, etc.

The website doesn’t have every language in the world, but it has a lot of them. choose your target language, in my case Italian, and enjoy, is fun and simple if you want to practice or do something related to your target language but you don’t have the willingness that day to study something more consistent like structure.