I use Memrise for the spaced repetition part. In the courses that I'm taking, the mnemonic techniques (associating pictures or whatever to new words) are just flat out horrible.
You need to make sure what you're learning is actually what you think you're learning; The blog post says "sobolanul" means "rat" but it actually means "the rat", "sobolan" is "rat".
That's just the convention in how words are presented to learners in different languages, I think, and it's surely obvious to anyone with even a few minutes of exposure to Romanian that -ul is one of the enclitics for the definite article.
Anyway, I don't know that's even a useful distinction on its own. The difference between "the X" and "X" doesn't map very well across languages, even within Europe. English drops the article in many circumstances in which Romance languages use it.
I've had the most success with Spaced Repetition Systems when I create the cards myself, and the cards are all material that I am reviewing, not something I have never seen before.
I think this makes a large difference for foreign language learning. I never focus on learning words. I always learn words in the context of a sentence. I choose my sentences by taking them from things people say, books I read, videos I watch, etc...This is especially helpful because when I review the sentences in the SRS sometime later, I will read the sentence and almost always recall the broader context in which I learned it (the page in the book, the scene in the movie). This works really well for learning how to use words (and idioms especially) in their proper context.
Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice: http://mnemosyne-proj.org/. Very customizable, but a lot easier to get started with than Anki. It's a local app, so no Internet needed, like Memrise. The one downside is no good mobile app version.
Hey, it sounds like you might be interested in my webapp for reading to learn foreign languages: http://readlang.com
It lets you:
- Upload texts to read, even entire novels, or read any webpage using a bookmarklet.
- Click on words or drag across phrases to translate them.
- Every word or phrase you translate is stored to your account, along with the context sentence, to learn with flashcards.
- Flashcards are prioritised using word frequency lists so you learn the most useful words first, they also use a SRS similar to Anki to schedule future appearances of a word.
Please give it a try, and if you are interested it could be cool to share some ideas.
I don't speak a single word of Romanian, but it seems similar to italian and a little french. I can read a newspaper and 'get' the meaning of the articles, for instance. It's an amusing language, not slavic at all like its neighbouring countries.
Good luck learning Romanian!
Side note: the Danish have a similar word to 'gezellig': 'hygge'.
I know a fair bit of Polish and keep seeing Slavic influences, but that could - now that I think about it - have been just as easy the other way around.
Makes you wonder if Russian picked up 'Da' from the South or if that somehow crossed over from the North. Most other Roman language use totally unrelated terms for 'yes' or general affirmation.
In the article you mention that Romanian isn't the hardest thing you’ve learned. Has any of the other European languages you know (Dutch, German, Polish) been more difficult?
I've often heard that Finnish and Hungarian are probably the hardest european languages to learn. I don't know any, but I've got some Hungarian friends and the few bits I've been teached don't show the opposite :)
As someone who speaks Romanian, Russian and Bulgarian, and has plenty of Albanian friends, I'm surprised that Albanian is be placed between Romanian and Russian.
I don't know exactly why it would even be linked to Romanian or Russian. The only cause I can think of is Turkish/Indian words that made their way into Romanian and Russian, but that makes the links extremely weak.
> I don't know exactly why it would even be linked to Romanian or Russian.
It comes down to a common origin that Romanians and Albanians share in Thracian tribes. A presumed Thraco-Illyrian language family[1] is the explanation for the weak[2], but relevant link between the two languages.
As for the Slavic connection, Wikipedia has this to say[3]: "Albanian does share two features with Balto-Slavic languages: a lengthening of syllabic consonants before voiced obstruents and a distinct treatment of long syllables ending in a sonorant."
For me, best approach to learn a new language is to read a book in parallel in both languages. I tend to use novels that were translated in both languages, this way I won't get into trouble with the way a particular writer uses the language. Imagine trying to learn English by reading Faulkner or Mark Twain.
For e.g, say that you are Dutch and want to learn Romanian, you buy a novel by Dostoyevsky (since this was written in Russian you can be sure it was translated in both languages) that you read before (this way you won't pay much attention to the story) and read it in parallel Dutch/Romanian.
19 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] threadAnyway, I don't know that's even a useful distinction on its own. The difference between "the X" and "X" doesn't map very well across languages, even within Europe. English drops the article in many circumstances in which Romance languages use it.
I think this makes a large difference for foreign language learning. I never focus on learning words. I always learn words in the context of a sentence. I choose my sentences by taking them from things people say, books I read, videos I watch, etc...This is especially helpful because when I review the sentences in the SRS sometime later, I will read the sentence and almost always recall the broader context in which I learned it (the page in the book, the scene in the movie). This works really well for learning how to use words (and idioms especially) in their proper context.
Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice: http://mnemosyne-proj.org/. Very customizable, but a lot easier to get started with than Anki. It's a local app, so no Internet needed, like Memrise. The one downside is no good mobile app version.
It lets you:
- Upload texts to read, even entire novels, or read any webpage using a bookmarklet.
- Click on words or drag across phrases to translate them.
- Every word or phrase you translate is stored to your account, along with the context sentence, to learn with flashcards.
- Flashcards are prioritised using word frequency lists so you learn the most useful words first, they also use a SRS similar to Anki to schedule future appearances of a word.
Please give it a try, and if you are interested it could be cool to share some ideas.
Makes you wonder if Russian picked up 'Da' from the South or if that somehow crossed over from the North. Most other Roman language use totally unrelated terms for 'yes' or general affirmation.
Try telling that to US universities where Romanian is usually studied in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature :-)
The truth is that Romanian is a romance language with more slavic imports than any other language from its family. This lexical distance graph makes it clear (Rom == Romanian): http://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-...
I don't know exactly why it would even be linked to Romanian or Russian. The only cause I can think of is Turkish/Indian words that made their way into Romanian and Russian, but that makes the links extremely weak.
It comes down to a common origin that Romanians and Albanians share in Thracian tribes. A presumed Thraco-Illyrian language family[1] is the explanation for the weak[2], but relevant link between the two languages.
As for the Slavic connection, Wikipedia has this to say[3]: "Albanian does share two features with Balto-Slavic languages: a lengthening of syllabic consonants before voiced obstruents and a distinct treatment of long syllables ending in a sonorant."
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thraco-Illyrian [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Romanian_words_of_possi... [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_language#Linguistic_af...
It's a fun language to know though!
http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition
(I've been reading that and the tons of references from there pretty much all day since writing that post).
For e.g, say that you are Dutch and want to learn Romanian, you buy a novel by Dostoyevsky (since this was written in Russian you can be sure it was translated in both languages) that you read before (this way you won't pay much attention to the story) and read it in parallel Dutch/Romanian.