[ExI] chinese synthesis

[Stefano Vaj]

On 25 May 2013 18:09, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> German is also a rather different language.
>

A cool strategy, IMHO, for those who would like to speak European -
something which is not an unattainable goal, and was rather common in the
Belle Epoque - is to be Italian mother tongue and be raised bilingual with
German - Latin and Ancient Greek going without saying in your high school
programmes.

Passive English comes out of that practically for free, and you can
leverage your Italian and Latin to quickly grasp the basic grammar and
vocabulary of all neo-Latin languages. In turn, German provides you a
sufficient root lexicon to learn to understand Dutch or Swedish by
yourself, not to mention the fact that words with a Greek etimology are one
and the same across the entire spectrum of European languages (I do not
know how to say theatre, epathitis or philosophy in Czech, but am confident
that I would recognise the words), which is also of help to approach the
last remaining big family, namely that of slavic legacy.

Another point about learning a new language is the motto 'Use it or lose
> it!'
> Learning is much easier if you can speak it every day with a native
> speaker.
> Book learning isn't much good on its own.


Depends. I cannot really speak or write Spanish - it is plagued with odd
pairs and false friends with Italian, and the similarity of the languages
is highly confusing, in that while they share a large part of their
vocabulary they are idiomatically very different -, but am very happy that
I need not resort to translation and dubbing when reading or watching
things in the language, so that I can appreciate the original writing
style, acting, etc.

This I mainly derived from going on reading books, novels and documents in
the language even though at the beginning my understanding was limited and
uncertain.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130531/ce65481c/attachment.html>