Tower of Babelfish
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Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.

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    • Tag Archives: language resources

    Hungarian book reviews and resources!

    Budapest

    BudapestAfter finally finding a grammar book that I can actually recommend, I’ve finished a Hungarian book reviews section. Just because not many people study it, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get some love. For those of you who might be shopping around for a new language, Hungarian is not as hard as everyone says. I think it’s just a rumor Hungarians like to spread so that they can talk amongst themselves without being understood in trains. The language is extremely orderly - the spelling is as easy as Spanish, once you get a hang of it, the dreaded case system is much better behaved than Russian, there are no noun genders, and the grammar is just cool. Check this out:

    a feleség (the wife) – a feleségem (my wife) – a feleségnek (to the wife, as in “He gave flowers to the wife”) – a feleségemnek (to my wife, as in “He gave flowers to my wife”). Awesome.

     

    Modern Hebrew book reviews and resources done!

    I’ve finished the Modern Hebrew book reviews/resources section! That means we currently have resource pages for the top 11 modern languages studied in the US (4 of the top 15 languages are American Sign Language, Ancient Greek, Ancient Hebrew and Latin). Eventually, I might include those, but not before I really have good recommendations for the main spoken languages!

    Hebrew proved a bit difficult; there really aren’t many good pronunciation resources for the language, and the textbook selection isn’t fantastic either. But I’ve found some good books hiding at Amazon, and if you happen to have some recommendations, let me know and I’ll add them!

    Preposition Images for Anki

    Screen Shot 2013-02-08 at 12.59.23 PM

    Just a short post that should prove useful if you’ve had trouble finding good pictures for prepositions (on, over, between) or directions (up, down, top, bottom). I found a lovely image of 29 prepositions in English on a language learning site for French students of English, Angloxchange. It has a bunch of English labels on it, but I cut the image up into little chunks, so you should be able to drag and drop your favorites into Anki.

    You’ll find the (cut up) image over hereScreen Shot 2013-03-28 at 2.21.40 PM

    New: A reader just suggested a Slovak website with 12 preposition images in the forms of cute sheep. If you prefer sheep to red balls, check them out here.

    What opera singers study, and how it can help… (Guest post at Fluentin3Months!)

    I wrote an article for Benny at Fluentin3Months.com about the opera singer perspective and what it has to offer to the language learning community.  Check it out!

    Dropping Barriers: What opera singers study, and how it can help you learn languages easier

    There’s another guest post in the works, and I’ll post a link here as soon as it’s up!

    Other updates: • Small addition to the Other Languages section - added a wonderful Portuguese frequency list for the first 350 words, with numerous example sentences.

    • Added links to Forvo and Rhinospike as pronunciation resources.

    • Added links to Linguee for English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.  It’s a really neat dictionary service that provides tons of example sentences and tells you about a given word’s frequency.  I wish it was available for Russian! (Anyone have any good Russian dictionaries, especially monolingual ones? When a word’s not well described in Wiktionary, I’m kind of out of options)

    • Fixed the email subscription widget - anyone who subscribed prior to today isn’t on the email list; sorry! Please subscribe again - it’s working now.

    Base vocabulary list for all languages!

    I’ve written a base vocabulary list of 400 words.  You can dump these into Anki right at the beginning to give you some words to play with.  This will give you some time to start learning grammar and checking words off of your target language’s frequency list.

     

    Minor cosmetic updates, and added Harry Potter books to the Learn Russian page.

    Learn Mandarin Chinese section done! Update to Learn Japanese…

    Access the new Learn Mandarin Chinese section here! I’ve also updated the Learn Japanese section to include Heisig’s excellent Remembering the Kanji/Remembering the Kana books.

    Added an easier to find link to my Anki decks if you want to look at them in the general Languages Resources section

    And last but not least, I think I finally got WordPress to fit inside of this blog without scroll bars on the bottom.  Please let me know if you see horizontal scroll bars under the blog, and if so, what operating system/browser you’re using!

    Also, if you’re just stopping by and you’d like to get an email whenever the book is available, contact me and I’ll send you an email when it’s out!  You can also follow the site on Facebook!