Posts Tagged ‘grammar’
Aug
Aug
Don’t think grammar is important? Think again!
I’m noticing a troubling theme in the language-learning and language-blogging community: people who are looked to as subject matter experts, time and time again, encouraging their readers and followers to forego grammar.
I’m deeply troubled by this.…
Aug
Aug
What is a partitive? The Italian word “ne”.
While the partitive exists in English, it goes mostly unused. Like so many other things in English, we understand it by implication. But as with so many other languages, implication alone isn’t good enough for Italian grammar.…
Aug
Aug
Why you need to stop whining about grammar
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about grammar which stirred a lot of reactions from people, accusing me of everything from being misleading to using scare tactics! And of course, since I’m making millions of dollars from people being afraid of grammar, I can totally see where they got that idea from.…
Sep
Sep
Ci, Vi, and Ne
We’ve learned about the reflexive pronouns ci and vi, and the partitive pronoun ne, but the Italian pronouns ci, vi, and ne… all have secret powers that other pronouns don’t have. Can you guess what it is?
Jan
Jan
Ongoing action: -iyor
Today, I’m excited to share my first grammatical observation about Turkish, which I’ve learned without studying at all!
As I mentioned recently, I changed my iPod to Turkish on new year’s day of this year, and since then I’ve been interacting with the device in Turkish and learning things as I do.
When I’m checking…
Mar
Mar
Can you learn a language in eight days?
It’s March 8th, so I want to wish a happy International Women’s Day to all my female readers today. And this year, it happens to coincide with Fat Tuesday, which means that here in Chicago, we also celebrate Pączki Day. (The Polish actually celebrated this last Thursday.) And speaking of Polish, that brings me to…
Mar
Mar
Learning Turkish with Tarkan
If you’ve been reading this site, you already know that I love using music to learn. Right from the start, one of the first things I do with a new language is find music to help me learn.
At the beginning of this year, I found several Turkish singers, one of whom was Tarkan. Admittedly…
Mar
Mar
Negation investigation
While browsing through referers to my web site, I found a thread on a Turkish forum. Cool! The thread is a discussion of Russian, and they linked to my explanation of Russian prefixes.
I decided to browse the thread and see if I could find something I can understand. But even better, I found something…
Mar
Mar
First person conjugations
We’ve looked at a few properties of verbs already, and already figured out a lot about verbs without using any instruction at all. But we still haven’t established even the basic first-person conjugations. After three months, I can’t even say “I’m hungry” yet!
Well, it turns out, I can say it. Actually, I can say…
Mar
Mar
More Turkish with Tarkan
Today is a good day to look at another Tarkan song. This is another one that I’ve found really catchy, called Çat Kapı. I couldn’t find the video for it, so it will just be accompanied by the audio. Also, I started with this translation, but tried to clean up the English grammar a bit…