Currently I am learning Esperanto (around 6 months) and German (just started yesterday).
For Esperanto I go on duolingo (to review the tree, I've already completed it), do some memrise and anki, and the Ana Pana course on Lernu.net
I also have a guy on skype who speaks Esperanto (30 years now he says).
For German I started off with duolingo and memrise. I'll probably watch Easy German (although I dislike the host lady) and some speaches from Hitler (or just normal videos, you know.)
Are any of you guys into language learning? What do you do everyday to learn/practice?
Since I'm new to hubski, I'm wondering if these threads are alive forever? Can I post in them, say 5 years from now, will it be relevant?
Saluton! I am currently learning Lojban, Esperanto, and Toki Pona. I noticed you wanted to join/start a linguistic cult. Common Honey is exactly what you desire.
Nah, I want to develop a language based on my Lampism cult.
Good question. There is no timeline to a post. If you comment on an old post and a discussion re-emerges it can find its way back in to people's threads. Also, many people use "chatter" to join in conversations. We believe strongly that a good topic is a good topic and shouldn't be considered off limits because it's a day, a week or even many months old.
Anybody else here digging the app DuoLingo? Looking below it actually appears to be the go-to for refresher and basic knowhow on the day-to-day. Plus as a gamer nerd it feels like "doing your dailies". I know it's no RosettaStone, but it has great features and on-the-go daily goals mixed in with voice recognition features that really overall impressed me. Really makes the 3 years of Spanish I took in high school all come flooding back and gives hope that I might actually make use of it at some point.
Duolingo is great for beginning a language. Especially with spanish since it is one of the original languages, it has the most developed features.
That makes a lot of sense. See I haven't tried any of the more fringe languages. How much of a differential have you noticed in quality?!
Well I've tried Norwegian a little, and have completed the Esperanto one (both are only a few months old). Here's some differences of Esperanto and German (German is also one of the original oldies). 1) At the top of the page, there is no "Words" or "Immersion" feature for Esperanto. 2) No Fluency Level Badge meter thingy (not that it really matters because it's not really accurate) for Esperanto 3) None of the following optional skills in shop: Idioms, Flirting, Christmas for Esperanto 4) German has a refined and expanded tree I believe. At the very least it has probably twice the amount of lessons as Esperanto. Some things that are also probably true is that German has less bugs, less errors, and more comments per post, but I can't confirm that. You can use the newer languages on Duolingo without much difference.
Wow that's quite the differential. I know the meter is wildly inaccurate, but it makes me feel accomplished. To be real it goes a long way in helping the learner visualize their progress (however tertiary it may actually be)... I never checked the comments much. Sounds like overall they don't provide a lot of insight, but the community is a great way to converse actively in the language. That makes a ton of sense. Hard to do with 2 posters...
I'm currently learning English (linguistic level) and German (amateur-level, through Duolingo, am looking for a proper Russian- or English-language text-/workbook for the language). Planning to go for Icelandic and Norwegian (the bokmaal kind, through Duolingo) soon since I'm already a bit in and have proper textbooks. Looking forward to learning Romanian, French, Portuguese in the future. Curious about Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese due to their non-Latin base and peculiar script. Thinking of taking up Korean in some undefined future. For German, I'm doing my best to have a bit of practice with Duolingo every day or two. I tell myself that it's as much as I can take, which may or may not be true. I've been speaking A1-A2 German from back when I attended the first uni, so now I'm merely refreshing the old material.
Russian! What a language. It's definitely on my list for to learn, because shouting in Russian and German sound so scary :3 Also the history which is very long and interesting.
I wouldn't want to advertise it as language to scare your enemies with, same as German. Both may sound more rough and gritty but, indeed, one can produce amazingly-beautifully-sounding sentences using it. Just listen to classic pieces of literature from both cultures read with quality. It may often have to do with understanding the language, too, so I may be biased on the matter. Some of the thoughts are expressed much more succinctly with those two languages. It's true for any language, naturally, yet I can only speak for the three I know on a level - Russian, English and German. In English, there are handy participle constuctions like "people working on the farm" which takes a bit more mental space in Russian due to being obstructed by commas on both ends if followed by something else ("люди, работающие на ферме, <did something>"). Commas add mental pauses, thus prolonging the reading time. Both German and English feature "who"-structures due to being Germanic languages: "those who speak Latin" and "wer Lateinisch spricht" (if my German is up to speed). I can't easily recall such constructions for Russian, but there are some, as I remember wondering how some things are much more easily expressed in Russian. Just a few tidbits.
I love languages. I'm working my way around the Latin languages of western Europe. Spanish, Italian, and now French. I just spent some time in Geneva and was so happy to be able to do basic things in French, but I have barely ever studied it and am wondering what it will take to learn of for reals. Duolingo perhaps?
As a linguist-in-study, I must make a note that those languages are more correctly called Romance languages (as in, Roman, the languages of Rome). "Latin languages" make sense as they portray the core meaning very well, but the latter rubs me the wrong way.
FWIW the Italian wikipedia lists them as synonyms, but it seems even there the norm is romance languages.
I'm not ready to answer this question with any kind of authority, unfortunately. I know the name does - from the adverb romanice, which itself comes from the adjective Romanicus, meaning "Roman". I also know that the Roman conquerors spread their language further within Europe where it got combined with the substrate languages of the local people (as well as de-/evolve with time) to form what we now know as Romance languages.
Devolve is just evolve with a d. Evolution can't go backwards unless we can reverse time and/or the second law of thermodynamics. There is no more or less evolved. There may be fitter or less fit, but that is relative to the environment, not an abstract idea of normalcy suggested as by "devolve". That's at least how this biologist sees it.
It's more that you can't say one thing is worse or another better. At least not in a technical sense. Things just change. And if something is relatively worse in a given environment, we say it's less fit, but the idea that it's somehow turned around doesn't match how the process worked. It always goes forward.
Evolution means change.over generations. So biologists would describe this as the species evolving to be less fit. From the perspective of our thread, the key thing is that the arrow always goes forward, and change as we follow things forward is evolution. Putting this yet another way, a set of mutations is incredibly (astronomically) unlikely to be reverted back to the ancestral state. Reversions do happen, but it would be basically impossible for a group of more than two or three mutations to spontaneously revert. If this weren't the case maybe devolve would be a technically useful idea. But thermodynamics being as it is, reversion is super rare. So species are always going forwards, with each new generation basing itself off the last, and no real opportunity to go backwards. I hope this is at least interesting because I am tired and it is coming out messily.
It's an explanation, but it's not correct. Any given feature is equally likely to become more or less complex over time. That's the entire premise of variability. The reason that we see more complexity with time is that there is a lower limit on how complex an organism can be, but there is no upper limit. So, statistically speaking, over time the average tends to be more complex. However, complexity has a high cost (in terms of energy usage), so where lower complexity is possible without sacrificing fecundity (as in the cave example I gave above), it will likely be favored. Don't fall into the trap of teleology, although it's easy to do (as we all think the world "wants" us to be here). The arrow of time moves forward, but the arrow of evolution doesn't exist. Full stop.
| The arrow of time moves forward, but the arrow of evolution doesn't exist. Full stop. Evolution is the change in heritable traits over successive generations. A situation where this stops is as impossible as one which it goes backward. It may go really, really slowly, but the second law of thermodynamics means it will continue. As such, I don't think there's anything wrong with understanding evolution as a ceaselessly progressing pattern. The idea that evolution could go backwards (devolve) is flawed and confuses the idea of evolution. We can only go backwards if time goes backwards. There is no underlying "fundamental" or "less-evolved" entity that can be reached from the present state by un-doing the steps that got us to the present. To reach a past state, a species must start from the present, so it is still evolution.
You're misunderstanding both natural selection and the 2nd law. That phenotypes can get more or less complex with equal probability has nothing whatever to do with the 2nd law. I believe you're conflating specific polymorphisms (which are invisible to the environment) with phenotypic variation (what natural selection actually selects for). Of course the probability that a specific mutation will occur "backward" is vanishingly low, but that's not what "evolution" is. Understanding evolution as ceaselessly progressing is not just incorrect but scientifically dangerous, as it implies that there's a directionality to the process. There isn't. There are stochastic changes that from time to time become beneficial to survival.
The entropy of things increases over time provided their size remains constant. This says nothing about the complexity of phenotypes, but it does suggest that it is unlikely for the same phenotype to be reproduced by a "devolving" process in which all the physical things on which the phenotype are based revert. Because life isn't a closed system (there is always energy in and out) the second law applies with a caveat that the flow energy can be used to maintain the state of the system. However, unless there is infinite energy available this won't be a perfect process and things will tend to change. I think we are talking past each other because I am focusing on genomic evolution and you are thinking about it from a phenotypic perspective. If we ignore that genomes determine phenotypes, and look at evolution as a progression through various phenotypic states then it is more comfortable to say that there is no direction to the process. To me, evolution is a physical process, but I think you have a different perspective. I also don't think you're wrong or I'm right--- my focus here was just to describe why "devolve" is not a technically rigorous concept!
"Devolution" is definition in biology. It's not a concept. It means the losing of previously evolved structures. As a definition it can't be incorrect, it can only be shown to exist or not it exist. It happens frequently, as a matter of fact. Again, the 2nd law doesn't apply in any way that it doesn't already apply to any other aspect of life. I don't know what this means. Of course it's physical. Organisms are made, destroyed; they eat, make new organisms along the way. There's an underlying molecular biology to it all, but all the processes at every level are physical.To me, evolution is a physical process, but I think you have a different perspective.
| "Devolution" is definition in biology. It's not a concept. It means the losing of previously evolved structures. As a definition it can't be incorrect, it can only be shown to exist or not it exist. It happens frequently, as a matter of fact. Again, the 2nd law doesn't apply in any way that it doesn't already apply to any other aspect of life. There is no "devolution" which is not more generally understood as "evolution". It can be confusing for people to talk about something devolving because it implies a hierarchy to evolution, and furthermore that we can "go backwards" down this hierarchy. In saying that evolution is always progressing, I'm just stating a physical fact. We can't become our parents or ancestors. To do so, there would have to be some process that remembered how they were and undid all the changes to our genomes that accumulated over time. The only way that we may begin to look like our ancestors is through the continued process of evolution.
It's useful when i study other subjects like sciences and names of important people in the past too
I went to a bilingual immersion school K-8, so I'm fluent in Spanish. I've finished all the high school classes my school offers, so now I'm taking a break from formally learning languages. I'm working on Italian on Duolingo. I've also picked up from bits and pieces of various languages from multi-lingual friends, but just enough to throw in my journals occasionally, not enough to talk with anyone. I'd love to find something like Duolingo for Arabic, but the apps I've tried suck overall. I'm still slowly picking up some vocabulary though. I used Anki for a while for Mandarin and Arabic, but I'm no longer on a computer everyday and it is hard to catch back up after missing a day.
I know there's a duolingo-like app for chinese. http://www.hellochinese.cc/ I've never used it however, so I don't know how good it is. For Arabic I guess somewhere like /r/languagelearning of reddit would help. Do you feel Italian is easy to learn being a fluent spanish speaker?
I know there's a duolingo-like app for chinese. http://www.hellochinese.cc/ I've never used it however, so I don't know how good it is. For Arabic I guess somewhere like /r/languagelearning of reddit would help. Do you feel Italian is easy to learn being a fluent spanish speaker?
I'm really into language, but I'm not so much into language learning. I really like language making, if that counts. I have some spare "learn the basics of German" youtube links hanging around, if I can find them. I'll edit them in when I can.
I'm currently in German classes, next semester I start classical Greek, and next year I start Latin :) Before these classes, though, I was learning German on my own--mostly with Memrise--and I'll have to go back to that next year for scheduling reasons. I may try out Duolingo this time. FWIW, I highly recommend this series for learning colloquial German: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMf--zRQGzvuDd4YPLXX17g5ZcCaWTlWP
Thanks. I will check it out. When you say classical Greek, is that the kind of Greek they speak today? Or is it ancient?
I love Duolingo! I'm currently learning Dutch. It is really helpful for learning to read/write a language, but I haven't had much luck with any of the voice stuff. I find reading the news or Wikipedia articles (simple ones) in Dutch helps a lot. Just gotta find some nearby Dutch folks when I've got a bit more confidence. Also, I have a lot of bilingual friends, so I've started picking up a bit of French. I think my biggest barrier is my pride. I don't like to mess up in front of people.
As an english speaker (I'm assuming) do you feel Dutch is easy or hard? I'm interested in learning it in the future. If you live in Europe, dutch people should be easy enough to find I think. Wikipedia articles do indeed help. And what you feel is very common, I believe. But you can never get good at talking to people if you practice and mess up ;3
I find it pretty easy. Of course the syntax is different and some of it is even simpler than English (for example, "a" and "an" are simply "een"). Of course, like any language, you do need to work at it. Give it a shot on Duolingo and see if it interests you! I am from Canada! Though I am hoping to do an exchange in the Netherlands, which is what inspired me in the first place. :) I know, I know! Just gotta find people who won't get annoyed with me... Thank you for the encouragement though!
He, I'd like to do Dutch but it's kinda far on my list (Esperanto - German - Spanish- Norwegian - French - Dutch) so in the far future...