Si and Doch ....

Si and Doch, the first word is French and the second is German. You say them after someone made a negative statement. The closest translation in English would be, ¨on the contrary.¨

Je ne parle pas Anglais. - Mais si! Tu parles Anglais!

I do not speak German so I cannot give you a German example of this negation in action. My question is this, can anyone tell me about any other languages that also have this? Please feel free to post directly on this blog.

On learning Arabic ...

Youtube is full of resources for anyone who wants to learn Arabic. There are lots of great channels for learning Arabic, but there is one little problem.

Youtube has a lot of Muslims who will try to convert you to Islam, or get you to learn Quranic Arabic instead of modern standardized Arabic. I just wish we could take the good Arabic Videos from Youtube, cut out all the religious stuff, and just put them together for people who want to learn the language - but do not want anyone trying to convert them to Islam.

Here are just three channels for learning Arabic on Youtube. These people have a lot of good videos, yet still can not manage to stay away from the religious stuff. They would get a lot more subscribers if the cut the religious stuff out completely.

Arabic One  Great channel!
Arabic Two This guy has the Quran as a background in his channel, but at least he does not mix religion into his channel.
Arabic Three  This man made a lot of good videos, but his early videos did have religious mumbo-jumbo.

I challenge anyone to make a Youtube channel for learning modern standardized Arabic and NOT do anything with religion. Is that possible ? Is this too much to ask???

Гьази-Кьумукь - Lak, rare language of Dagestan

I don´t know about you, but I love looking at maps. Ever since I was a child one of my favorite activities was looking at globes. The image above is a linguistic map of North East Caucasian Languages they comprise a language family spoken in Russian, Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia and northern Azebaijan.

A little background information on this war torn region. Azerbaijan is rich in oil and gas. The Russians want to control the pipe lines that run from Azerbaijan to the Black Sea. This region provides oil to much of Western Europe. It is pretty easy to understand the situation just by looking at this map. But, this blog is about languages not about politics. So lets hop back to the main point.

The people of Dagestan speak a rare languages. Languges of Dagestan are: Agul, Avar, Dargwa, Lak, Lexgin, Rutul, Tabasaran, and Tsakhur. One of those rare languages,  Lak, is spoken only by 160,000 people. The current Lak alphabet is the Cyrillic alphabet. What is interesting about the Lak language, is that up until the nineteen twenties, Lak used the Arabic alphabet, then it was written in the Latin alphabet and now it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. This means that a person born during WWI, had to learn three different alphabets to write their own language.

Amazing. That my friends, is all about politics and religion.

One person referred to this region as...¨Nobody-gives-a-fucki-Stan.¨ BTW...you know who you are! Naughty, naughty, naughty!

One of the other rare languages of Dagestan is Aghul. Twenty eight thousand people speak Aghul, most of them live in Dagestan.The language contrasts voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives with voiceless epiglottal stops and fricatives. Fricative sounds are produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel. The place of articulation is the pharyngeal, which basically means the root of the tongue against the back of the throat. 

Avar Language, ¨language of the mountains,¨ is another official language of Dagestan. It is spoken by over one million people worldwide. Avar also uses the Cyrillic Alphabet. 

Albanian

Nearly eight million people speak Albanian. One would think that there would be more materials available for learning Albanian. I have had a hard time finding them. The interesting thing is that in New York City I knew a lot of Albanians. Many of them live in the Bronx. One would think that there would be some interest in learning this language. Below I have listed three things. Links to Albanian language resources, a few videos, and an image of the Albanian alphabet.

PIMSLEUR ALBANIAN  541 ALBANIAN VERBS COLLOQUIAL ALBANIAN   

How to buy language material from Amazon

Have you ever studied Chinese?

If you have never studied Chinese, and would like to start today, watch these two videos posted by Laoshu505000.

In these two short videos he gives you a step by step guide about what to do your first six weeks learning Chinese.

Bon Courage

اردو - My first introduction to Urdu, the language of Pakistan

I signed up on Live Mocha for Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. I am not sure if I will learn Urdu, but if I do, Urdu will be the first Indo-Aryan language I have ever studied. Urdu is the lingua-franka of Pakistan and a few Indian States. Urdu developed under heavy Arabic, Turkic, and Persian influences. There are so many similarities between Hindu and Urdu that at a basic level, there is mutual intelligibility.

The first part of learning Urdu, at least for me, means learning how to write the alphabet. The Urdu alphabet has 38 letters. My first task will be to write the entire Urdu alphabet everyday for at least two weeks. I am not sure if this will be enough for me. Maybe I will need to practice the alphabet for a lot longer than that.

Here is the plan - I am going to make a simple Urdu workbook. In the workbook, I can practice writing the letters over and over again until they get the hang of it.  This does sound tedious, but unfortunately that is how we have to learn a lot of these foreign alphabets. Repetition.

If I do this then eventually I will be able to write the entire Urdu alphabet with greater ease. Then I will be able to connect letters together. After I write basic words, then I can write bigger, more complicated words. From there, I will be able to write little sentences. Language learning is cumulative. First, we learn to add and subtract. After we learn that, then we can learn how to multiply and divide. From there, we learn basic algebra. Then, we can perform more complex algebra.

As always, I provide links.  URDU LANGUAGE LINKS. This language is on the back burner for me. If I make any progress on this one I will blog about it.