Learning a new language...

[Ladylethal 12]

*coughIknowcough*

[Welshcookie 17]

I just immersed myself in it while I lived there...granted, it was British English...and his accent is lovely...but omG...the people in his town......might as well have been Mandarin Chinese

hehehe...I remember the first week lived together i said a whole sentance and he looked at me and said..'I have no clue what you just said...'

apart from that....I am learning Spanish online....

[Ladylethal 12]

When Luis speaks spanish, I get clueless as well, even though I understand other people in the streets, the TV, etc.

[iceyspots 0]

I took two years of French in high school, 2 semesters of French at the University level, spent 5 months in Montreal before.. and I'm telling you there's no better teacher than immersion learning.

I also took 1 semester of Arabic at Eastern Michigan University. It's just a basic class. I was thinking about taking a couple classes in the summer, but I'm not quite sure yet!

French is more than likely an easier route for you, since you don't have to learn an entire new alphabet like you do with arabic (although french does have accented letters). Arabic is also at a higher level of difficulty because the language lacks certain letters, and has two of a bunch of different letters.

I've heard that the Rosetta stone language courses are pretty good.. They're a little pricey (I think around 200-300$)... but.. you pay for what you get.

Plus you have many of us that speak Arabic on the boards (and I'm not %100 sure but I think I'm one of the few francophones that posts in this forum)... we're always here to help.

Good luck!

Me and my fiance use english since I´m not profficient enough in spanish and he´s not profficient enough in portuguese.

Ohh! Portugese is such a beautiful language... From what I know.. and I've heard it spoken.. is that the words are more similiar to Spanish, but they have the beauty of French !

I'm predicting ultra-employable tri-lingual kids for you guys!

Yacine expects our children to be quadrilingual... He wants them to speak English, French, Arabic, and Kaybile as well... I told him it is possible, but wow that's gotta be tough... hehe

Okay... my posting buddy sriniv reminded me that I need to learn my SO's language(s)...

Why would you have to do that? Is your SO not proficient in English ?

[Veiled Princess 1]

I personally don't care for RS but then again I've never used it past the free trial. I started with a book called "Read and Speak Arabic For Beginners" by Jane Wightwick that you can order from BAM or Amazon. It's fun and has activities to complete. It's not really standard Arabic though so I have moved on to a free book I found online in PDF format.

http://www.fatwa-online.com/downloads/dow002/index.htm

and here you can access the lessons online for help in pronunciation and to get the answers

http://www.taibauniversity.org/eMaahad/eBo...evel1/index.htm

But this is formal Arabic so I don't know if that's what you are trying to learn or if you're interested in a particular dialect.

Your SO could always help you as well. That's what my fiance and I do. I do the work and email it to him then he corrects it and tries to sneak his dialect in too sometimes LOL. Once I started learning basic greetings and stuff like that we decided that it would be good to use what I've learned so we try to talk (type) as much as possible in Arabic then when I'm stuck we just talk in English the rest of the night Luckily he is fluent in English.

Oh and I watch the Arabic channels on TV too. Mostly Al Jazeera since they speak formal Arabic there but some Egyptian movies too. On Abu Dhabi there is a show that used to come on at midnight before the time change (now it's at 1am so I haven't been watching it) that I am addicted too. Yousuf thinks it's so funny because I really don't understand much of it at all. Like, I didn't even know for sure what it was about at first until he started watching and telling me about it the next day LOL. But it gets me used to hearing it spoken instead of just reading and writing it.

Hope that helps and good luck.

Edited April 11, 2006 by veiledprincesslayla

[Jasman0717 9]

I tried everything and nothing worked so just went back to pointing

[Ladylethal 12]

I heard Portuguese sounds very russian like to foreigners, actually. I think French is beautiful.

[Dixie_Peach 1]

I took two years of French in high school, 2 semesters of French at the University level, spent 5 months in Montreal before.. and I'm telling you there's no better teacher than immersion learning.

I also took 1 semester of Arabic at Eastern Michigan University. It's just a basic class. I was thinking about taking a couple classes in the summer, but I'm not quite sure yet!

French is more than likely an easier route for you, since you don't have to learn an entire new alphabet like you do with arabic (although french does have accented letters). Arabic is also at a higher level of difficulty because the language lacks certain letters, and has two of a bunch of different letters.

I've heard that the Rosetta stone language courses are pretty good.. They're a little pricey (I think around 200-300$)... but.. you pay for what you get.

Plus you have many of us that speak Arabic on the boards (and I'm not %100 sure but I think I'm one of the few francophones that posts in this forum)... we're always here to help.

Good luck!

Me and my fiance use english since I´m not profficient enough in spanish and he´s not profficient enough in portuguese.

Ohh! Portugese is such a beautiful language... From what I know.. and I've heard it spoken.. is that the words are more similiar to Spanish, but they have the beauty of French !

I'm predicting ultra-employable tri-lingual kids for you guys!

Yacine expects our children to be quadrilingual... He wants them to speak English, French, Arabic, and Kaybile as well... I told him it is possible, but wow that's gotta be tough... hehe

Okay... my posting buddy sriniv reminded me that I need to learn my SO's language(s)...

Why would you have to do that? Is your SO not proficient in English ?

iceyspots... my SO speaks English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian & something he calls Berber... not sure where that one comes in at... and I thought that I would like to learn Arabic or French to converse with his family... as they speak very limited english.

[MrMrsKnight 0]

I tried everything and nothing worked so just went back to pointing

That's one way to go!

I was actually very very bad at English in school, I didn't care about learning it at all and always got less than 10% right when there was a test.

I finally started taking a course 3 months before I turned 18, I knew some of the language then(from watching moviesand listening to music), but wasn't great and couldn't hold a conversation.

3 months after I started that course I met Dave and we could talk(type and read) just normally, one month after that we could already talk on the phone, and when he got here I was already totally fluent. Of course I improved since then (living with him helped SO much), most (95%) of the accent is gone. When someone asks me how they can learn English fast, I recomend that course, watching movies and listening to music as well!

I heard Portuguese sounds very russian like to foreigners, actually. I think French is beautiful.

Really?? I heard it sounds very romantic like French.

[minha_raposa 0]

I use Rosetta Stone. It really is an awesome program and they have most languages. www2.rosettastone.com

[Ladylethal 12]

Do you, as a brazilian, think portuguese is romantic? I think our R´s end up sounding too harsh.

[MrMrsKnight 0]

Do you, as a brazilian, think portuguese is romantic? I think our R´s end up sounding too harsh.

Well I'm from ES, I'm sure our accents are VERY different! My Rs and Ts are more soft in my opinion...

[meddykomp 0]

I use Pimsleur for now ... when we can move to Sweden I can take classes for free and then of course just living there I will pick it up.

[Jenn! 918]

... my SO speaks English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian & something he calls Berber... not sure where that one comes in at...

Lynne, Berber is spoken in southern Morocco...

[Ladylethal 12]

Yeah, I´d think so as well, carioques is not very pretty.