http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1235

capitiane fracasse

or anything by voltaire, Candide and Zadig are good

theres an author called yasmina khadra(pen-name, its a bloke) who is algerian and writes in french. im led to believe hes fairly popular and fairly good. studied an extract from rêves des loups or something, it wasnt really my thing

>>5543

à quoi rêvent les loups* i think

>>5524
Well obviously, there is Albert Camus, who was Algerian I believe.

>>5314
Like anything else, it starts off tedious but gets better as you go.
You'll have to take a course on the history of linguistics, which will basically be a bunch about how Europeans could literally sit and watch Romance languages evolve out of Latin, the Middle English Creole Theory, probably at least a week on Sumerian, why Chomsky is always wrong, and some stuff about the expansion of the field as whiteys took over Africa and the Americas.

There is a subfield called "lexicostatistics", which is the numerical comparison of sounds to guess how closely related languages are and which can be used to reverse-engineer our best guess at what the previous form of a language looked like. Basically anything with "proto" in the name (Proto-Indoeuropean, protoceltic, proto-austronesian) has been artificially backtracked through this method, there's nothing to really atttest to what they actually looked like. If you want "science" what to get into.

The other people can be kind of annoying, most other students are the opposite of her- failed Spanish majors.

>>5312
lolwat

krashen is wrong
chomsky changed the entire direction of linguistics
not everything he says is 'right' (give the guy a break... he has been writing constantly since the 60s)

most of his shit isnt easily tested anyway
so there is no clear right/wrong
>>5318
what school do you go to?
we never had to do history of linguistics at the university of washington

linguistics is a really really varied field
sociolinguistics is like anthropology

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>>5326
Linguist here (Semitic Historical, primarily). I can't stand Chomsky, and I think the language organ theory is bunk, but I have to agree that he has been extremely important in the development of modern Linguistic theory (kinda like I hate Mozart, but I would readily admit he was a great composer).
People who say "I hate Linguistics because it makes 'art' into 'science" don't understand what they're talking about, and are probably really saying "This shit doesn't make any sense to me." Language IS a part of science. If you want to be artistic with language, write poetry, or better yet, construct a language.

>>5516
I guess that girl thought she would study something about art and it appeared she was studying something about science, like comparative grammar, lexicology, etc.

I'm a Ukrainian myself and I'd like to try receiving a PhD abroad (i doubt it would be the USA though), though I have a very strong feeling... that I better not to try that. Well anyway, what can you tell me about modern linguistics or applied linguistics? You, guys, who are doctorates or post-graduates?

Hell I don't even have any questions to ask. I just feel scared badly and I don't know if I should try it and I know for sure I would never stay in Ukraine, I would never do any science in this goddamn Ukraine lol. How does it feel, to be a linguistic postgraduate?

By the way, we learnt nothing about Chomsky here. Well, just that he's an awesome guy and his approach was mentioned, nothing more. Of course we learnt about many mediocre Russian linguists whom you know nothing about, anyway.

>>5312

>As a linguistics major, fuck that.

What the fuck are you talking about? The Chomsky Hierarchy is a mathematical concept, it doesn't even touch his political stuff. You probably picked the very most defendable of any of his theories to shit on.
(I come from the computer science side of things, I'm currently getting paid for writing a decompiler, which btw is a problem very much related to this discussion)

If you actually had autism you wouldn't tell people you had autism.
If you want to be weird learn a Celtic language.

>>5525
by autism he means high-functioning autism or asparagus.

Cyrillic is easy to learn. Easiest part of learning Russian tbqh.

>>5535
correct

我下中文課，可是我的中文不好。

中文太難了。我們每星期有考試。

>>5502

中文不很难！！ 我爱汉字爱的非常。 要是你向成功，就 嘚联系，复习，也得下个课的标余西。 我写中文子写的太好了。也觉得中文的子有意思，可是说中文说的很慢。

你今年在什么及？

：P

我五年半学汉语，这事是我最喜欢的爱好。我现在住在北京，当然学普通话。可我去年去香港换签证。然后我现在也想学广东话，可我知道我没有那么时间。

Other than the site http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban and I'm sure you no doubt know the wikipedi article, I'm not aware of any.

This being said, its a new developed language so I'm sure there's something.

You can hop on IRC for more information on how to donate to keep this site alive, which is where all donated funds go believe it or not. Thanks.

As far as Sanskrit goes, there's plenty of academic-minded books on the subject, but beware of older ones/anything printed sorta cheaply, because it makes the Sanskrit nearly fucking impossible to read. I have "Teach Yourself Sanskrit' and the characters are fudged so much I have to keep a second list of them nearby for compare-contrasting purposes just to be sure on what the book is saying.

If you get the "Bhagavad Gita: As It Is" - so, the one specifically translated by Swami Prabhupada - he goes through the entire thing listing first the original sanskrit, then the romanization, then the individual words and what they mean, and THEN the nice, proper translation afterwards. (Keep in mind that he's sprinkled in his own dogma into the final translation, but that his word-for-word parts seemed perfectly legit from what I recall.) I'd recommend that for getting a hang on things/watching someone basically do a translating exercise for you, for 300+ pages.

Otherwise, I'm really new into teaching myself Sanskrit as well, and have basically abandoned it for the time being in favor of Norwegian. So good luck, OP!

As someone who works with the children of immigrants, the majority of Arab-speakers who move to the US (and I'm guessing other English-speaking nations) don't teach their children their own language. There's a shitload of stuff online to go from English-Arabic, I don't know about Russian-Arabic though. Here's a good one for the alphabet but it goes through English. I'm sure at least you could learn the alphabet through Russian on ru.wikipedia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIoxAxruys

For Confucian Chinese I'm a bit at a loss bro. It's not something that has a high demand for scholarship in the English or Russian (or Esperanto) world. I hate to say but you'd have best luck if you knew chinese and then working backwarrds, but that of course would take god knows how many years. Maybe it's best to move that to the bottom of the list.

You could start by learning one at time, trust me, you can't learn two languages at once.

you should come on over to Krautchan /int/ and speak to us, we have nice balls. I 'll just apologise in advance for the *insert random nation here to wind them up*

A strategy I've found that helps is to 1) a least start with related classical languages, then branch out if you're adventurous 2) acquaint yourself with Linguistic principles, especially since MANY books on classical languages presuppose knowledge of them (an there are generally no native speakers, since classical language is generally code for "dead" or "frozen"). Also, doing this helps you figure out more easily how the language works.
What I did is that my academic field (i.e. my degrees/career) is in Classical and Colloquial Arabic. From this, I was able to start learning Biblical Hebrew and Classical Syriac without much difficulty, especially since (IMO) both are MUCH easier than Arabic, but the overall structures are similar, lots of shared cognates, etc. I can now read both relatively easily. I've also started learning Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan (I'm interested in Buddhist and Hindu studies), and IMO, Sanskrit is hands-down the most difficult language I've ever studied. The sandhi, sentence structure, cases, consonant ligatures, and derivation are really tough, and much less algebraic than Arabic, no matter how many people claim Sanskrit is an "ideal computer language blah blah nonsense."

Nope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish
There's the wikipedia article. There are a few resources linked at the bottom of the page.

You might argue phrasal verbs, but phrasal verbs can be learned or substituted for other verbs. Try learning literally hundreds of possible pronoun, noun, and adjective endings (each part of speech has its own declensions) in 7 cases (14 if you count plural as a different case, since it has different endings) and 4 genders like in Czech.

The only thing significant about the British royal family is that they're the descendants of William the Conqueror. Without him, English anywhere in the world would not be the same.

just my 2 pence

I was pondering upon this last night. I speak natively Spanish, fluent in English and intermidiate in German. German and Spanish letters never change their pronunciation and if they do, they are identified by other punctuation marks like the difference in the Spanish gue and güe. My mother learnt English once she was a grown up and I can always tell she has a difficulty pronouncing some words because in her head she imagines the spelling and try to say the letters as they sound.

I used to have the same feeling as the OP, that English was a polluted, ugly-sounding language, but after a few years, after having studied more foreign languages in depth, I came to fully recant it. Besides the fact that opprobrium generated by the sound of a language is completely illogical, English's record-sized vocabulary gives a wealth of alternative ways to say the same things with different connotations, making it very easy to write richly descriptive sentences. Not to mention the fact that English is the biggest language in terms of number of speakers, and unlikely to lose its dominant footing anytime soon.

If "returning" to a "clean" English means sounding like this:

http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream

then, no, thanks.

For nearly a thousand years, French and Latin have exerted a vast influence on what we think of as English. There is no "clean" English except for Anglo-Saxon. And if you want to speak Anglo-Saxon, just move to Iceland and learn Icelandic. It's probably the closest living language to Anglo-Saxon.

At any rate, I'll keep my hodgepodge English over the gutted version represented by Anglish any day.

unecessary bump for support

You want the words repeated. The best and fastest way to learn a word is to see it in various contexts. Muff.

>>5450
No no, then it would just be a book. I would want to separate the words into a single list. Take an English book for example. It's 500 pages long and you probably need about 100 words to read it. If you broke it down into a list of non repeating words though it would only fill about 10 pages.

This is a way to learn the words so you can use them in all the different contexts.

>>5455
1000 words, not 100. Sorry.

http://boards.420chan.org/prog/res/20674.php

Link to /prog/ thread.