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Post by Queen on Jan 23, 2022 9:37:40 GMT -5
apparently
"Chieftain of the pudding race"
becomes
"Great Führer of the sausage people"
which is pleasing
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 23, 2022 13:32:50 GMT -5
Thank you all! I seem to be in the Bureaucratic portion of German Duolingo now.
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Post by Queen on Jan 23, 2022 13:39:55 GMT -5
Thank you all! I seem to be in the Bureaucratic portion of German Duolingo now. I suspect there's quite a lot of it. As a German colleague says "we do like a rule".
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Post by tzarine on Jan 23, 2022 13:53:54 GMT -5
everyone ive worked w in hong kong refuses to speak mandarin these days when i first went to hk, i spoke mandarin & people thought i was either a snob or a girl from taipei
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 23, 2022 16:16:47 GMT -5
Thank you all! I seem to be in the Bureaucratic portion of German Duolingo now. Agree with Q that this sounds like an important section!
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Post by rikita on Jan 23, 2022 17:29:33 GMT -5
as for using the word - i sometimes feel odd about it when using it by itself and will either look for a different one (sometimes i will say "guide" even though i am speaking german - but i am also a bit strange, and i guess many people won't mind using it as long as the context is clear), but it feels normal when using it in a compound noun, like führerschein or reiseführer or bergführer or something like that ...
oh, and there is also the word "anführer" - for like the leader of a gang, or any group of people doing something together ...
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Post by rikita on Jan 27, 2022 20:10:01 GMT -5
those of you who use duolingo, can you explain to me how the whole thing with the purple crowns works? a. doesn't want to move to the next level without finishing everything on the first one, and for that she has to finish that whole purple crown thing. she did one, and when we click on it now, there is this option of one task or challenge or whatever they call it, and that is not clickable, and the option of get plus or something like that, and that leads us right back to where we just were. and i can't find any simple explanation on the website ...
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 27, 2022 22:00:03 GMT -5
The purple crowns thing ("Legendary") is optional - it's harder because you don't get to hover over any of the words to get a hint as to what you're supposed to do. Plus each purple one has 3 or 4 levels to it, which you have to complete before you can turn the lesson purple, and you can only get three errors or you you have to start over again.
So it's ok to leave them as gold and only try for purple when you feel ready to do it, in my opinion! You can tell a. that I haven't tried for purple in German except for the easiest early ones because I'm still pretty bad at it!
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 27, 2022 22:13:26 GMT -5
PS thank you for reminding me that I hadn't done it yet today. It's 10:00 at night so I chose the easiest one (French!)
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Post by rikita on Jan 28, 2022 3:21:08 GMT -5
well, the one it let her do she actually managed pretty well, the problem now is, we can't even open the next one ...
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Post by sprite on Jan 28, 2022 6:54:30 GMT -5
that is so frustrating, because you want to keep her going while she's keen. re-installing the app might make her lose all her progress.
Tzarine, I thought Taipei spoke Cantonese?
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Post by Queen on Jan 28, 2022 13:15:14 GMT -5
Tzarine, I thought Taipei spoke Cantonese? No, Mandarin, usually with traditional characters not the simplified ones used in Mainland China. There are other Chinese dialects, usually Hakka and Hokkien dialects, and a bunch of indigenous languages.
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Post by tzarine on Jan 28, 2022 20:04:43 GMT -5
Tzarine, I thought Taipei spoke Cantonese? No, Mandarin, usually with traditional characters not the simplified ones used in Mainland China. There are other Chinese dialects, usually Hakka and Hokkien dialects, and a bunch of indigenous languages. q thanks for the explanation also lots of older folks spoke japanese from the occupation & matsu dialect my uni chinese teacher was taiwanese. she was not having any of the ccp propaganda texts where you would learn bout the 8th route army before learning where is the toilet?
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Post by tzarine on Feb 22, 2022 18:21:08 GMT -5
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Post by lillielangtry on Feb 23, 2022 1:40:16 GMT -5
I've seen this guy before, but here he is reporting on Ukraine:
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Post by riverhorse on Feb 23, 2022 2:19:21 GMT -5
Luxembougisch is THE weirdest language!
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Post by Liiisa on Feb 23, 2022 12:32:08 GMT -5
Before that guy appeared on Twitter I had no idea it existed!
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Post by riverhorse on Feb 23, 2022 13:15:30 GMT -5
We're close enough here to Luxembourg that we can pick up their radio stations. It always makes me laugh to hear it - it's probably close to 90% German but with a really funny accent, with the rest French thrown in, so very easy to understand but just plain WEIRD!
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Post by rikita on Feb 23, 2022 17:06:32 GMT -5
listened to some videos on youtube now - sometimes, when i concentrate, i understand quite a bit, and then suddenly, i understand nothing ... i suppose if i heard it more often (like, if i lived closer to luxembourg) i'd start understanding it more easily ...
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Post by lillielangtry on Feb 24, 2022 0:47:16 GMT -5
Some rude people on twitter do keep saying it's not a "real language" - but where the boundary is between a dialect and a language is always partly political. For example Farsi/Dari, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Danish/Norwegian, etc. Any time languages are more or less mutually intelligible you'll get some people with strong opinions on whether they actually "count"!
I also saw a Belgian point out that the official language of Belgium (besides French and German) is Dutch, and not "Flemish", regardless of people's use of that word to describe the variant of Dutch spoken in Belgium. I hadn't known that.
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Post by vinnyd on Feb 24, 2022 11:36:38 GMT -5
and Montenegrin.
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Post by lillielangtry on Feb 24, 2022 11:52:47 GMT -5
Indeed. When I'm reading books from the region, I go by the language named by the publisher ("translated from the Bosnian", etc) but in at least one book I own, it just says "translated by" and I believe that was the publisher's way of trying to avoid any debates...
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Post by Queen on Feb 24, 2022 16:31:06 GMT -5
I always think Luxembourgish sounds like a drunk Dutch guy trying to speak German... and I used to work with a group of Dutch/Belgian/Luxembourgers on a project so I heard it reasonably often. I did not mention my opinion at the time I found a video that goes through six sentences in Lux/Deutsche. But I can get the gist based on Dutch (eg; first sentence would be " we willen blijven wat we zijn" and in Lux it's " mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn"
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Post by vinnyd on Feb 25, 2022 7:03:20 GMT -5
So "we" in Luxembourgish is "mir"? That's the same as Yiddish.
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Post by lillielangtry on Feb 25, 2022 7:32:33 GMT -5
And Kölsch.
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Post by riverhorse on Feb 25, 2022 8:28:12 GMT -5
^^^ this is probably another reason why I understand Luxembourgisch so well
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Post by psw on Feb 25, 2022 11:50:09 GMT -5
So "we" in Luxembourgish is "mir"? That's the same as Yiddish. Slavic root - Russian my (mwee) Yiddish - mir is also dative/indirect object first person, as in Bei MIR bist du shayn
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Post by vinnyd on Feb 25, 2022 13:55:31 GMT -5
Wiktionary says "From Middle High German mir (alternative form of wir), by assimilation to a preceding verb from Old High German wir, from Proto-Germanic *wiz. Compare regional German mir, which see for more." Personal pronouns aren’t borrowed very often. (But English did borrow they/their/them from Norse, perhaps partly because the native plural pronouns could be confused with the words for she, her, and him).
The mir in Bei mir bist du sheyn is also German (as is every other word in the song title).
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Post by snowwhite on Mar 7, 2022 8:09:30 GMT -5
I'm now trying to get to grips with the rules around adjectival agreement in Danish. Apparently 'the green strawberry' requires a different form from 'I eat a green strawberry'. I am hampered by the fact I'm still learning the actual colour words and their various forms (slowly), along with other vocabulary, can't always remember whether nouns are en or et words, and that I haven't got the agreement rules straight yet. I'm wondering which other languages work like this? Ie agreement interacts with both definiteness and gender? On the plus side the children were disproportionately entertained this morning when I taught them how to say 'I am reading a chicken'. EDIT: I've just found this blog entry which I think explains it.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 7, 2022 8:37:09 GMT -5
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