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 FSI Language Courses Forum : Learning Languages : General Discussion
Message Icon Topic: What Languages do you speak or want to learn?! Post Reply Post New Topic
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lemony_steve
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Quote lemony_steve Replybullet Topic: What Languages do you speak or want to learn?!
    Posted: 09 January 2007 at 11:17pm
Tell us which languages you speak, are learning, or want to learn!
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andrew
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Quote andrew Replybullet Posted: 10 January 2007 at 12:29am
Hi,
 
I speak English as my native language and Spanish as my second language. I finished the FSI spanish basic course (I bought all 4 levels from multilingual books a few years ago). I live in Spain and so pratice quite a lot ;). The difference in the accents here (im in the south of spain) are very different from those on the course. However, I couldnt recommend the FSI spanish basic (sorry I dont have any experience with the programatic) enough! Providing you improve your vocab etc (easy after finishing the course just by listening and speaking, no vocab lists) you can become fully integrated! I still listen to level 4 from time to time to keep my past subjuntive etc sharp!
 
After "finishing" studying spanish (when I can read cervantes quite well) I would like to move on to Russian, Latin and Greek. For Latin I would use the assimil course. I have the "Spoken Russian" from spoken language services and Modern Rusian from Georgetown university press. Both use an FSI approach and so they should serve quite well to get well beyond the basics.
 
For the greek course I wouldnt really use anything else except pimsluer for the basics and then move on to the FSI course. I find that doing things this way you dont need to look at the FSI text so much and you can get more out of it if you drive etc or are on the bus and dont have time to study at home reading the texts.
 
Regards,
Andrew
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zwazo319
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Quote zwazo319 Replybullet Posted: 13 February 2007 at 9:40pm
I am very surprised that this site does not have the Italian language.  I stongly recommend adding it if possible.
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onebir
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Quote onebir Replybullet Posted: 14 February 2007 at 12:46pm
Have a look at the status page:
http://fsi-language-courses.com/status.aspx

The Italian programmatic course seems to be on the way.  Unfortunately, the Italian basic course isn't supposed to be very good, so it might be some time before that gets added.
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Sir Nigel
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Quote Sir Nigel Replybullet Posted: 22 February 2007 at 11:59pm
I'd say my ambitions are too high! Firstly, I want to learn Spanish, Russian, French, German and Dutch. Other language I have an interest in are Portuguese, Swedish and well, many others.

Oh, I speak English naively as well.
Insurance Excuse:
The accident was due to the road bending.
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smoen
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Quote smoen Replybullet Posted: 23 February 2007 at 8:13am
[Oh, I speak English naively as well.]

Naively or natively?  Sorry, couldn't pass that one up. LOLLOL

smoen
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nieuk
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Quote nieuk Replybullet Posted: 24 February 2007 at 7:34am
You have to love those Freudian slips LOL
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Sir Nigel
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Quote Sir Nigel Replybullet Posted: 25 February 2007 at 9:01pm
Yeah, it was supposed to be natively. I blame the spell-checker I used!


Edited by Sir Nigel - 25 February 2007 at 9:01pm
Insurance Excuse:
The accident was due to the road bending.
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flashback_0245
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Quote flashback_0245 Replybullet Posted: 01 March 2007 at 10:32am
Hello,
My native language is Russian, I speak more or less fluently Polish, French and Lithuanian (the latter I'm progressively forgetting due to lack of practise), now trying to learn Hungarian and Hebrew (depending on my mood:) and would like to learn Czech a lot, so I would be very thankful if you add here FSI Czech if possible.
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Linas
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Quote Linas Replybullet Posted: 08 March 2007 at 2:22am
My languages
 
 
Speaking well - Lithuanian(native), English, Russian
 
Speaking to some degree - French, German, Polish, Latvian. I could speak them, but I need some immersion, for example to read something in those languages or to listen for a while in order to get ready to speak
 
Speaking a little bit - Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. I also need immersion to be ready for these languages and my proficiency is lower.
 
Do not speak, but have more or less solid reading knowledge - Dutch, Scandinavian languages, Rumanian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Bulgarian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian
 
Can read some texts, but have to use dictionary a lot - Estonian, Hungarian, Hindi
 
Have some rudiments, but cannot say that know - Irish, Finnish, Greek
 
Languages that I do not know nothing at all(or tried but have learned nothing), but maybe will try to learn one day, at least acquire reading knowledge(unfortunately probably not all of themCry)
 
Europe: Welsh, Basque, Albanian, Icelandic
Middle East: Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian
South Asia: Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Tibetan
South-East Asia: Indonesian, Pilipino, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian
East Asia: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Africa: Swahili, Lingala, Yoruba, Hausa
Americas:Guarani
 
Languages in bold have higher priority.
 
The most important questions for me are:
 
-how to activize language you have a substantial passive knowledge already(if you know only to read, how to learn to speak?)
 
-how efficiently acquire vocabulary of a new language
 
Now I am experimening with the following method( hope it will work for both purposes) - you take a phrase from the text of the language you are learning, let it be "yesterday the little child was very afraid of going to school" and start repeating the first word at first:
 
yesterday... yesterday...yesterday(10 times or maybe more or less, as necessary). When you are confortable with the first word, you add another one:
 
yesterday the little... yesterday the little...( 10 times again) 
 
yesterday the little child...yesterday the little child...(10 times again) and so on until you can produce the phrase without too much difficulty.
 
If you are completely unfamiliar with the language it is better to write a word-for-word translation of the phrase and have before the eyes while you repeat, if you understand the phrase already but cannot yet produce perhaps this would not be necessary. 
 
Finally I would like to add some links for alternative material of the languages of which there are FSI courses:
 
Thai
A textbook based on a childish story, but a serious learning tool. The 2/3 of the first part is rather training for sounds and tones although made from meaningful phrases, the rest are coherent simple stories for reading and listening.
Online Thai dictionary which list model sentences for the most of entries
Another, larger on-line Thai-English dictionary
 
Some material for conversational Thai
especially this one:
 
reading materials for thai:
 
 
Vietnamese
 
Khmer
 
The same site http://www.seasite.niu.edu also has materials for Burmese, Lao, Indonesian and Pilipino
Many of these pages need to have font installed:
 
Korean
Although they say that the course is intermediate I had not too much difficulty to follow the first lesson. Maybe later it gets harder 
 
Swahili
 


Edited by Linas - 08 March 2007 at 9:07am
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