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People don't seem to have much to say in this group - maybe waiting to see how it turns out? Anybody else love languages simply qua languages? I love Finnish - such a silly language somehow, having to make all their words out of not enough letters. I don't speak or understand a word of it but that doesn't stop me liking to see it. I have been a TESL teacher for many years, among other things so I am a bit of a grammar addict.

CeliaVL 7 June 19
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0

What is a TESL teacher?

cobras Level 3 Nov 19, 2018

Teacher of English as a second language. Also called TEFL - Teacher of English as a foreign language.

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I'd also like to learn Finnish, it seems a fascinating language. Counting to ten is hard enough!

Salo Level 7 July 22, 2018
1

I minored in Spanish and studied quite a bit of Old English back in college, I have since experimented with a few others. My favorite language learning attempt was Arabic. My friend and I attempted to learn Arabic without a tutor or native speaker to guide us. We failed in the most hilarious ways - mostly it was the pronunciation (and the cursive version of the alphabet) that got us. We actually still learned quite a lot and gained an even deeper appreciation of the language. But for now it's back to studying Spanish for me and Japanese for her until we can find an MSA teacher/tutor. 😀

sc62 Level 5 July 10, 2018

Well done for trying!I have been tempted to try one of the 'curly' languages, just for fun, though I think maybe Thai looks easier - at least the letters seem to be easier to write.

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I'm trying to learn German, but at 74 I seem to have lost the language ability I had earlier in life. I had no trouble learning French. Spanish. Russian, in my youth, but now it seems to have dropped away. I shall keep trying though - I love the German language.

CeliaVL Level 7 June 20, 2018
2

There aren't enough members yet for the group to spark into life - a group with a similar purpose on Facebook (search for "omniglot fan club" - it's a weird name, but it's the best group of its kind that I've found, so I'd recommend it everyone here) had hundreds of members before it had enough action on it to make it worth visiting regularly, so it may be a long time before that happens here, but we probably need more extroverts to kick off the action.

Finnish is one of my top target languages just because it sounds beautiful (I feel sorry for the Finns, because it sounds ordinary to them and they can't appreciate it the way we do). I had trouble finding a good language course for it though. I tried to work through Arthur H. Whitney's Teach Yourself Finnish many years ago, but it's pretty dire. It has good texts, but no translations - it sends you hunting for words in an increasing number of vocabulary lists such that you spend 99% of your time just looking them up instead of learning the language. It was replaced by a new course written by someone else who dumbed things down so much that there was little point in buying it. I switched to doing Hungarian instead, but I'm going to return to Finnish soon - it's now possible to type the texts into Google Translate and to use its translations to understand them without having to look up any words, so the impossible task has now become a fully practical one.

The main difficulty in learning any language is in working out how to learn them from inadequate language courses. Sometimes you have to buy several different ones and work though one as far as you can before switching to another, eventually returning to the first one and finding that you can get further with it the next time. When you're working through them for the first time, don't do what they tell you to do, but concentrate 100% on learning to understand them instead of trying to produce your own sentences in the language you're learning - the latter merely serves to slow you down and make the task seem practically impossible. Learn like a child learning their native language - they always learn to understand first, and they learn without effort, never trying to memorise anything or to learn rules. They just absorb by exposure.

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