Swedish compared vocabulary #2

Hej!!

Today I had some fun learning Swedish and was amazed at how similar the Germanic languages can be.

I've made a list of words I've learned today as follows:

Ligga - Liegen(DE) → Be located
Knacka- Knock(EN)
Dörr - Door (EN)
Lyssna - Listen(EN)
Fönster - Fenster(DE) →Window
Gå - Gehen(DE)→Go
Lyfta - Lift(EN)
Säga - Sagen(DE)→Say
Öppna - Öffnen(DE)→Open

The list will continue as my studies progress.

Tack bra och Heydå!

Using a linguistic approach to learn

Hej! Cześć!
Today I realized something cool on the train as I went through my Polish and Swedish books of the エキスプレス (Express) series for learning languages.
Since I speak fluent German and have also studied some Russian I realized that there was some important info from these languages that could help me learn faster.

As I studied Swedish today I bumped into some words I had already learned (Or Similar) in German such as Väder(Wetter in German) for weather, Ungefär (Ungefähr) for approximately, båda (Beide in German) for both, riktigt (Richtig in German) for correct, Kök (Küche in German) for kitcheb, Stol (Stuhl in German) for chair, Stan (Stadt in German) for city, Möbel (Exact spell in German) for furniture to name a few. In addition to that I also learned få (Which reminded me of FEW). That's only what happens in terms of vocabulary. I could also look at grammar but that's a topic for another episode. It is no wonder that the Swedes learn German or English much better and faster than speakers of Latin languages, for example.

Next let's try Polish that belongs to the slavic languages along with Russian and another couple of languages.

I was surprised the word used for asking for permission "można" when Russian uses МÓЖНО, I also learned PRAVDA (Truth) which is ПРÁВДА in Russian, JĘZYK (Language) which is ЯЗЫК in Russian. I am sure that more similar words will come to the surface since the Slavic languages are said to have many similarities in vocabulary, something that's not a reality when it comes to Latin languages. As a Portuguese speaker I'm still struggling to improve my vocabulary in Spanish, Italian and French because words with a similar spelling might have meanings which are as different as language from different linguistics families. I remember I tried to say FUNNY in Italian and use the Portuguese DIVERTIDO, which means funny in Portuguese but in Italian that meant "FAT" and the word for funny is DIVERTENTE. I'm not sure about the Italian spelling, though...

In Portuguese PASSA might mean GET OU OF HERE when in Spanish one invites his/her guest to come in by saying the same word.

French is so different from Portuguese that I learned German much faster by comparing it with English.

When it comes to asian language like Japanese, Chinese and Korean, these are so different that one feels like learning a new language. However, Korean and Japanese share a lot of grammatical similarities (The so called Altaic languages) which are said to diminish the more one researches in older forms of these languages. Chinese was easier for me to study because of the characters that help me learn vocabulary faster but I still had to learn (Still struggle) the tones...

Well, that's all for now and I'm looking forward to your comments and/or corrections.

Tack så mycket, Dziękuję

Oops, I forgot the Polish fonts!

As I tested the fonts installed on the mac I realized that I could also use the following Polish fonts:
ą, ę,ł
In order to do that one must press alt before a, e and l.

Now I can properly write the name of Poland's former President Mr. Lech Wałęsa.

Do widzenia!

Using a macintosh to go multilingual

G'day mate!!
Sorry for the Australian greeting, which I happened to hear in "Ravenshoe" when I visited Australia in 2003 even though I hear that this isn't used often.
After having studied Russian, Korean, Chinese, French, Italian and having restarted studying Polish, Finnish and Swedish there's something that always comes to my mind: How am I supposed to write in all of these languages that use some tricky letters?
Well, after I bought my new Macintosh with Leopard installed my problems are over because I can find fonts for all the aforesaid languages and there's something COOL about writing in traditional Chinese (繁体字）, Korean and Russian , which required one to learn a different keyboard setting in order to write in the Panther OS days. In the case of the traditional Chinese, one had to know the so called POMOFOin order to write anything.
Now I can write stuff just like I type to write in English or other language that uses an alphabet.
Let me give you some examples writing my name using my name JULIO.
Simplified Chinese （Zhulio）:朱礼欧
Traditional Chinese (Zhulio): 朱禮歐
Russian: йулио(If I type exactly JULIO) but the correct would be жулио
Korean: 주료
Japanese: ジュリオ
Hebrew: חוליו,which would be cool if my name were pronounced like in Spanish but since I'm Julio (joo lee oh) גיוליו would sound better.
Greek: ιθλιο but this is somewhat different in my opinion. I guess ιονλιο would sound better...
If I knew how to use Arabic and the Devanagari alphabet I could also try to write my name in Arabic and Hindi but I'd better not.

After struggling with fonts installation and crazy keyboard settings I decided to use the MAC for multilingual writing and study. I wonder how everybody is doing to write.

Cheers!!

I started studying Polish, Finnish and Swedish again

After a while without posting due to lack of ideas about what I should write I felt motivated to study Polish again because of a program running on a TV in Japan and Finnish because I met some people at my church. Swedish has been in my list since 2004 because my pastor was from Sweden at that time. It is really interesting to study language that are totally different from the latin languages specially Finnish, which is said to be an Asian language. It has structures that remind me of the Japanese language such as the pospositions and vocalic harmony. From these 3 languages Polish might be tough to learn due to the small number of vowels in words. The "perfective" and Imperfective" verb thingy is also complicated in addition to the change in a word radical. Swedish is the easiest to learn because I speak German, which is also a Germanic language. Sometimes I feel I'm just learning to speak another Germanic dialect.
Tschüß, Heydå, Do widzenia, Näkemiin

English as my first language

I left Brazil for the first time in 1993 as when I was granted a prize from the Japan Foundation and used English on a daily basis for the first time. I had never imagined using more English than my native language and have to express everything I wanted as though I was speaking Portuguese. At this time I had the opportunity to meet people from dozens of countries and listen to several English accents. Unfortunately this experience only lasted 2 weeks but it was a wonderful experience to visit Japan for the first time after started studying Japanese in 1991 at Rio de Janeiro Federal University. During this trip I was able to see famous places in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima.

From read to spoken English

As I entered Rio de Janeiro Federal University in 1991 I had contact with spoken English for the first time at the age of 17. Before that I only read magazines (Speak up, Newsweek and Time) and listened to music in English. It was nice to meet foreign students who came to Brazil to learn Portuguese and communicate in English. What attracted more in studying English was the possibility of communicating with people I’d never talk if English wasn’t the lingua franca. Also, English gave me access to language-related materials or any book that I wanted to read, whether it was a novel or a technical book.
Back to college, I was able to read André Martinét and Saussure for my linguistics classes, which gave me a glimpse of what I could do if I mastered English.