January 25, 2011

Learning a simple language

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone,


as I said many many times, I am very sure that there are people out there who have much more experience with language learning or language tutoring than me and I do not consider myself to be an expert in this field at all. People sometimes ask me, how to start learning a foreign language, but truly, I don't know how to answer and I really don't think that I am the most competent person to do so too. I have not read any book on how people learn or should learn languages, and I have only some teaching experience. The few things that I've read about how we learn languages or new things in general were mostly online and almost everything that I've learned myself I learned by trying and trying until something eventually worked (doing a lot of thinking during the trial and error process of course), so I don't know how many people would be interested in listening to my rants on language learning, since they only might work for me and might not work for the next person.

But, maybe there will be someone out there who might get some new ideas from what I say and I can be only happy about that so I will try to make this small introduction to language learning today, starting with a "how to learn a simple language" podcast. Enjoy.

Continue to Part II.

January 19, 2011

Phonetic typology of the Chinese language

Listen to MP3

Typology

- comparison of languages based on their formal structure
- no historical connections
- only the analysis of the present state of the language

Types of typology: syntactic, phonetic..

Phonological typology

Syllabic language - every syllable is a morpheme

Morpheme - shortest sound which still has a meaning

Phonetic typology:

Tonal language
Tone  - a melody of the voice, in which a syllable is pronounced and which has the same importance as any letter of the syllable

Historical division of Chinese

Old Chinese

1000 B.C. – 3rd/4th cen A.D.
- probably no tones – they developed form suffixes
- probably not a syllabic language

January 05, 2011

The Chinese script

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone.

Since there is a fairly large amount of youtube channels, blogs or podcasts, where people can get very good information on language learning or anything related to this field, I thought that I might be talking about things that have been said many times before and decided to try to do this recording in a more academic way. I’d like to discuss a rather specific topic, but a one that still might be interesting to listeners not so familiar with the subject – the Chinese script.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and wish you a belated Happy New Year.


Chinese script

-         writing is a form in which you can express language units

Characteristics of the Chinese scritp:

  1. morphemographic
  2. syllabic
 Characters:

Han dynasty reform
8 strokes:

                                    Yong3