Paid Members Carbomb Posted December 2, 2018 Paid Members Share Posted December 2, 2018 14 hours ago, PowerButchi said: I'm not actually fluent in Welsh. Coming from the border (not as much as Mr Danger who is a Caer fuck) i can make a good fist of it and tell people why Popty Ping is dogshit, but I couldn't go to see GarYnysMon in Llangefni or whatever and fire fast and true. I know who Mistar Urdd is though, yn yr coch, gwyn a gwydd. The Urdd is vital to Welsh language. Interesting - I remembered you saying you watch Pobol y Cwm, which is why I made that assumption. How much of it do you understand when you watch? The "Popty Ping" thing was told to me by a bloke from Maesteg, so chances are he didn't actually speak much Welsh. (Also, what's "Caer" and "Urdd" mean?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fog Dude Posted December 2, 2018 Share Posted December 2, 2018 5 hours ago, Carbomb said: Interesting - I remembered you saying you watch Pobol y Cwm, which is why I made that assumption. How much of it do you understand when you watch? The "Popty Ping" thing was told to me by a bloke from Maesteg, so chances are he didn't actually speak much Welsh. (Also, what's "Caer" and "Urdd" mean?) Caer is Chester but I think Butch might be referring to a more Welsh-speaking place like Caernarfon, whose inhabitants were usually referred to as Cofis in Bangor. I learned the proper Welsh word for microwave from Pam Fi Duw? on S4C (whose writer unfortunately turned out to be a nonce) back in the day long before the silly onomatopoeic one was popularised UK-wide by The Apprentice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Jazzy G Posted December 2, 2018 Paid Members Share Posted December 2, 2018 I did French in school, and some Spanish. I've tried learning Japanese from a few different means. The Michel Thomas method is good, but rather expensive. Pimsleur is ok. I'm currently trying to mull over whether I want to try and learn Polish to try make things a little easier at work, or Hungarian so I can go and visit the land of my ancestry. I've got a pretty cool course from Amazon on my Kindle, and tried learning both through Duolingo as well, but the Hungarian is still in beta I think. Languages are ace. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members garynysmon Posted December 18, 2018 Paid Members Share Posted December 18, 2018 On 12/2/2018 at 12:07 AM, PowerButchi said: I'm not actually fluent in Welsh. Coming from the border (not as much as Mr Danger who is a Caer fuck) i can make a good fist of it and tell people why Popty Ping is dogshit, but I couldn't go to see GarYnysMon in Llangefni or whatever and fire fast and true. I'm sure you'd be surprised how quickly you'd be completely fluent, especially if you already have a grasp of the basics. Its all down to using it every day I suppose, which isn't always easy in some parts of Wales after you leave school. Welsh is my first language, can obviously speak English thanks to my education and also speak a little German but would like to study some more. I keep putting it off tbh. A lot of people think that Welsh is difficult as it looks so different to a Germanic language like English. But as its phonetic its quite easy to get a hold of it and the spelling is relatively easy (especially compared to English with so many silent letters etc). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted December 20, 2018 Paid Members Share Posted December 20, 2018 Perhaps for the TIL thread, but I thought I should share a couple of neat linguistic bits I picked up recently. The first one is that Marouane Fellaini is, by way of nominative determinism, a heel. The word "villain" comes from the pejorative use of the word "villein" meaning "peasant", which comes from the Latin for "farmhand". This also found its way into Arabic as "fellaini". The other one is an amusing proverb that an Italian friend taught me: Se mia nonna avesse le ruote, sarebbe una bicicleta - "If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bicycle." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members garynysmon Posted December 20, 2018 Paid Members Share Posted December 20, 2018 On 12/2/2018 at 2:29 PM, Carbomb said: The "Popty Ping" thing was told to me by a bloke from Maesteg, so chances are he didn't actually speak much Welsh. (Also, what's "Caer" and "Urdd" mean?) The correct Welsh word for a microwave is 'Meicrodon' which a literal translation as 'ton' is 'wave'. I have no idea where Popty Ping came from, I'd guess someone called it that once to take the piss and it just stated to gather from moss. Caer is the Welsh name for Chester but also means 'fort. The Urdd is a youth organisation which is held entirely in Welsh, it organises an annual Eisteddfod, has two holiday camps, has branches across Wales etc. The closest parallel I could think of in England is the Young Farmers organisation or maybe the Scouts, but its pretty unique and difficult to describe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted December 20, 2018 Share Posted December 20, 2018 14 minutes ago, Carbomb said: The other one is an amusing proverb that an Italian friend taught me: Se mia nonna avesse le ruote, sarebbe una bicicleta - "If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bicycle." I thought everyone had seen this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted December 20, 2018 Paid Members Share Posted December 20, 2018 Ha, I hadn't seen that! Don't tend to watch TV in the mornings (except, on occasion, Homes Under The Hammer). My friend Giacinto taught me the expression, but I'm glad to see Gino getting it out there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Fatty Facesitter Posted January 1, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted January 1, 2019 Kicking off my 2019 by making more of an effort to learn Portuguese. It’ll be eight years with the other half in February and I have been putting it off for an age because I am A) Thick, B) Lazy and C) It’s a bloody difficult language to learn (see point A). We’re heading back over to see her family in Lisbon again around April so I’ve got four months to improve on my current vocabulary and impress them. Apart from your bare basics like hello, good morning etc, currently I can order beer, chicken, chips and a magnum classic (Um cerveja e frango e batatas fritas e Magnum Classico por favor? Obrigado!*) and say thank you. Personally I think that’s more than enough to get me by, but in the name of love I’m aiming to expand on this a bit. I’m late to the party with it but Duolingo is brilliant. It is painfully easily to use for an uncultured simpleton like myself to use and through memorising and re-doing excercises I’m picking things up already, and I’ve only spent a couple of hours on it thus far. Even though it’s free I’m already sure I’ll be getting the ad free version. At the back end of this year I’m also going to try my hand at some Japanese - not necessarily to become fluent but again just to get to know the basics. I’m hoping to go to the Olympics in 2020, so in the event I get in a jiffy it could make the difference between survival and getting killed by the Yakuza. *That is almost definitely wrong. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fog Dude Posted January 2, 2019 Share Posted January 2, 2019 The Portuguese course on Duolingo has a Brazilian flag and the Christ the Redeemer statue for its logo. That's not a good look to rock up in Lisbon with, from what I hear. Just do the Spanish course instead and then arrive speaking it with a Russian accent. I'm sure that will pass muster. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rey_Piste Posted January 2, 2019 Share Posted January 2, 2019 The bits of Portuguese I know were learned from my old BJJ teacher, so knowing how to correctly apply and a gogolplata isn't particularly useful unless I get into a ruck. I do know little bits of lots of languages, mostly from when I went travelling around Europe from my backpacker's guidebook. I can pretty much order beer and ask for the toilet in every European language. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members SpiritOfTheForest Posted January 2, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted January 2, 2019 56 minutes ago, Fog Dude said: speaking it with a Russian accent. Funnily enough, I finally decided to google this only last week to what all this is about. It turns out it's because both Portuguese and Russian have a different way of dealing with the stress placed on syllables than other European languages. Because Portuguese uses the "sh" sound regularly, with the stress they put on it, it comes out sounding very similar to Russian to us. It's strange how similar Portuguese and Spanish are in many ways in their written forms but they sound totally different when spoken - language is something which I simply find fascinating. Mr Facesitter, I'd recommend you get on Memrise as well as Duolingo. It's also free and you'll soon find that Duolingo will start teaching you a lot of nonsense sentences (presumably to help get you to grips with sentence structure and tenses) while Memrise teaches a lot more practical stuff. That is of course assuming their Portuguese courses are like the Spanish. Another thing to bear in mind, as mentioned above, Duolingo teaches Brazilian Portuguese. I have never studied the language myself so I'm purely speculating but I'd recommend making sure there are no major differences between the tongue spoken in Brazil to that of Portugal. Latin American Spanish for example has no You (plural) pronoun while in Spain they do have one (Vosotros) and it's widely used. Would have been baffling reading/speaking to Castillan speakers had I not known this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Awards Moderator HarmonicGenerator Posted January 2, 2019 Awards Moderator Share Posted January 2, 2019 Does anyone know if there are useful ways to start learning BSL online, or do you need to attend a course? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted January 2, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted January 2, 2019 8 hours ago, Fog Dude said: The Portuguese course on Duolingo has a Brazilian flag and the Christ the Redeemer statue for its logo. That's not a good look to rock up in Lisbon with, from what I hear. I was told the opposite. When I started learning Portuguese, I made it a point of principle to start learning European Portuguese, as I get a little peeved when continental Europeans learn American English. However, when I mentioned this to some Portuguese acquaintances, almost all of them told me that I should learn Brazilian, that it sounds much cooler and melodic, and that European Portuguese sounds awful because they "chew" [sic] their words. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Ronnie Posted February 1, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted February 1, 2019 On 12/1/2018 at 11:07 AM, PowerButchi said: Was it Ronnie that spoke Esperanto? He was a polyglot as well. But yeah, your best bet here is Carbomb. It's true that I have the world's least impressive superpower, yep. Or jes (pronounced the same), as the espies would say. On 12/1/2018 at 11:08 PM, Carbomb said: Ronnie does speak Esperanto, I think - he has a passion for languages that vastly outshines mine, I'm pretty sure. But then linguistics is his actual focus. That's kind of you to say but I'm a bit fraudulent if I've come across like that. I'm functionally fluent in a couple and can read passively in several because they all happen to be related. But I'm not good outside my comfort zone of Romance languages (ie French and Italian, which I'm comfortable in, and then relations like Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, which are visibly related and which I've read books in). I don't have the diligence to learn languages anymore. We've put off organising a trip to Romania for a few years because I never got around to learning the language properly. I've actually given it a go finally because Ronette's just booked a trip to Russia after only starting to learn the language a couple of years ago, so I've got no excuse really. But January ended yesterday, so there's every chance that my attempts to learn a language again will end up going the same way as resolutions like "eat vegetables", "do some exercise" and "smile every now and again" have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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