Buy foreign language books for children this Christmas.

Christmas Shopping for the Kiddies

The best time to learn foreign languages is when we are children. Since we cannot roll back the clocks, maybe what we can do is buy foreign language books for our children. First, let me just say that it was no easy task finding these websites. I am willing to do the work for something that I think is important. For me, language learning is important.

If you would like to buy some foreign language books for your little ones, check out the following links. I would like to find websites for buying books in Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, and Greek. If you know any other languages or websites, post a comment on this blog. 

Chinese Alphabet in photos

Chinese does not have an alphabet in the sense that we know it in the West. Chinesecharacters are not really letters, they are characters that represent concepts and ideas. Enjoy these images. If you need to learn how to type Chinese with your English/American keyboard, visit my other blog: How to type Chinese  Please subscribe to my blog. I enjoy publishing useful material to my viewers.

Naomi

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Chinese, German, English, Russian, Japanese Words For the Fall and Halloween

In Chinese (Traditional / Simplified font): 

spider: 蜘蛛 (zhīzhū) 
fall, autumn: 秋季 (qiūjì) 
broom: 掃把 / 扫把 (sàobǎ) 
candy: 糖 (táng) or 糖果 (tángguǒ) 
candle: 蠟燭 / 蜡烛 (làzhú) 
cemetery: 墳場 / 坟场 (fénchǎng) or 墓園 / 墓园 (mùyuán) 
black cat: 黑貓 / 黑猫(hēimāo) 
bat: 蝙蝠 (biānfú) 
pumpkin: 南瓜 (nánguā) 
costume: 服裝 / 服装 (fúzhuāng) 
devil: 魔鬼 (móguǐ) or 魔王 (mówáng) 
scarecrow: 稻草人 (dàocǎorén) 
ghost: 魔鬼 (móguǐ). Chinese don't usually distinguish between devil & ghost. 
jack-o'-lantern: 南瓜燈 / 南瓜灯 (nánguādēng). Lit. translation: pumpkin light. 
leaf: 葉 / 叶 (yè) 
Halloween: 鬼節 / 鬼节 (guǐjié) 
to haunt: 嚇人 / 吓人 (xiàrén). To scare someone to death: 嚇死人 / 吓死人 (xiàsǐrén) 
to play a trick (on someone): 做鬼 (zuòguǐ) 
goblin: 小妖精 (xiǎoyāojīng) 
mask: 面具 (miànjù) 
mummy: 木乃伊 (mùnǎiyī) 
monster: 怪物 (guàiwu) or 妖怪 (yāoguài) 
October: 十月 (shíyuè) 
witch: 魔女 (mónǚ) 
skeleton: 骨骼 (gǔgé) or 屍骨 (shīgǔ) for bones of the dead. 
All Saints' Day: 萬聖節 / 万圣节 (wànshèngjié) lit. translation 10,000 Saints Festival 
(All Saint's Day) or 萬靈節 / 万灵节 (wànlíngjié) lit. translation: 10,000 Souls 
Festival (All Soul's Day). 
the thirty-first: 三十一日 (sānshíyīrì) or 三十一號 / 三十一号 ((sānshíyīháo) 
vampire: 吸血鬼 (xīxuèguǐ) for blood-sucking ghost or 僵屍 / 僵尸 (jiāngshī) the Chinese 
version. 

South America is the linguistic powerhouse

Did you know that in the South American continent, there are thirty four language families and over a dozen isolated stocks with about one thousand individual languages? Wowza. It looks like the Amazon can brag about biological and linguistic diversity. This represents the highest level of diversity as compared with any other continent. All of Africa, Asia, and Europe combined have twenty one language families. Africa, for example, the single family Niger-Congo has 1436 languages while Bantu has over 1000. 

So how did this happen? Native Americans migrated from Asia in three separate waves over 10,000 years.  It is important to have a good sense of time, and with that, a good sense about how long it take a language to evolve to the point that it would not be recognizable by ancestors going back five, six, or ten generations. It is amazing when you think about it. 

With each large migration of Indians, spanning that huge chunk of time, they all would have been foreign to each other. Imagine the second or third wave arriving, and seeing Indians who arrived three thousand years prior. They will not have a common language. Their cultures may be very different from each other. 

Incorporating the Holidays into foreign language learning

One of the best ways to build vocabulary is to make the information personal to you in some way. As we have entered my favorite time of year, I have been thinking about how we can incorporate our holidays and seasons into language learning. I would like to than the contributors from Learn Any Language in helping me gather these words. It was a lot of work and could not be done without them. 

What makes this trick unique, is that within each culture and language, the holidays are expressed differently. There may be some holidays and celebrations that we are not accustomed to. It is a good opportunity to expand our holiday vocabulary, while learning about new traditions.

Again, I would like to thank the forum members for helping me with this list. I am putting together more lists from other languages. 

Kashmiri Language Study

Hello Readers,

I never studied Kashmiri, Hindi or anything remotely close to these languages. However, I know that many of my readers do. In this blog you will find several images, kashmiri language, basic kashmiri phonics, sentence structure and grammar. Feel free to use these images. 

Wikipedia: 

Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کأشُر Koshur) is an Indo-Aryan language and it is spoken primarily in the Kashmir Valley, in Jammu and Kashmir. There are approximately 5,527,698 speakers throughout India, according to the Census of 2001. Most of the 105,000^{[citation needed]} speakers or so in Pakistan are émigrés from the Kashmir Valley after the partition of India.They include a few speakers residing in border villages in Neelum District.

The Kashmiri language is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India, and is a part of the Sixth Schedule in the constitution of the Jammu and Kashmir. Along with other regional languages mentioned in the Sixth Schedule, as well as Hindi and Urdu, the Kashmiri language is to be developed in the state. Some Kashmiri speakers frequently use Hindi as a second language, though the most frequently used second language is Urdu. Since November 2008, the Kashmiri language has been made a compulsory subject in all schools in the Valley up to the secondary level.

Dwadling aling in Mandarin - III

With my computer problems lately I was able to organize my I-POD. A few days ago I finally was able to load all of my Chinese Living Language Lessons onto my IPOD. I take the boys to the library every week for story time. It is a good forty minute walk. While pushing the double stroller, getting much needed exercise, I listened to the Lessons. The beginning was just nuts and bolts, words, and phrases.

I went through six full Chinese lessons in Pimsleur. Pimsleur requires repetition, and anticipation of answers. The method is slightly different from Living Language. What made me very happy was when I started to recognize words. It felt like it was coming together and sentences were starting to roll from my mind with a certain, ease, or naturalness that I have not experienced in awhile. Of course, I am still in the nuts and bolts rudimentary stages of Chinese. I must admit that trying this language was a great decision. I am glad I did it.

I will keep you posted on my progress.